Mat 3 Cats

Welcome back to another exciting Matinee in the Balcony!

Ooh, baby, today we’ve got one classic cartoon for you, directed by Tex Avery and released in 1955. A crusty old sea salt weaves a tale about a cute li’l penguin and a dumb but tenacious polar bear that are after fish from the hold of a ship stuck on an ice floe.

There’s this ferocious watchdog guarding the fish, see. He sleeps a lot, but Chilly keeps waking him up. Dog bites bear, bear sings “Rock-a-Bye Baby”, dog goes back to sleep. Then the cycle begins again.
Say, in that hat Chilly looks a bit like Michael Nesmith, no?
Chilly Willy isn’t what I’d call a personable little guy, and according to Leonard Maltin, Tex Avery never quite knew what to do with him. Studio brass liked him, though, so Chilly stayed. Actually, Chilly outlasted Tex at the studio.

The cartoon never quite explains where Chilly gets the dynamite and anvil and stuff, but sometimes you just have to let art flow over you. In any case, a penguin battling a polar bear needs all the help he can get.

Rockabye Point was nominated for an Oscar; it lost to Speedy Gonzales (Warner Bros.).
My favorite moment is when the bear gets an anvil dropped on his head… he then (to remain quiet) writes the word OUCH on a piece of paper, followed by an *%$(# (the universal cartoon language for “expletive deleted”).
In the end, bear and dog end up trapped on an iceberg, where they live happily ever after. A little too happily, if you ask me.
The Legend of Rockabye Point is available on the Woody Woodpecker & Friends DVDs from Columbia House.

On to our classic comedy short!

Hey, Joe McDoakes – the average man – joins us this week In The Balcony. That’s him over there behind the eight ball. See? Just an average joe.

Joe and his wife are faced with an evil landlord who wants them out so he can raise the rent. He’s cut their electricity, heat, and gas, and tells them he’s redecorating their apartment by putting up yellow wallpaper with big monkey pictures and cutting a hole in their floor for an elevator.
Joe is off to find an apartment but has a series of misadventures, including finding an apartment the size of a shoebox and losing $100 to a landlord in a harebrained “bet” that he couldn’t find a vacant room.
So You Want an Apartment was released in 1948, when the postwar housing crunch faced many young ex-GIs looking for apartments for themselves and their new families.
George O’Hanlon and Jane Harker play McDoakes and wife; George would have several Mrs. over the years, including Phyllis “Lois Lane” Coates.
O'Hanlon's voice is easily recognizable even if these films are not: he went on to be the voice of George Jetson!
Finally, Joe goes to an apartment broker (“We operate the whitest black market in town!”) who rents him his own apartment again – now with elevator and monkey wallpaper.
The Joe McDoakes series ran for dozens of films from 1942 to 1956.
So You Want an Apartment is not currently available on video or DVD.

The latest chapter of our thrilling cliffhanger, The Hurricane Express starring John Wayne!

When we last left our hero, his gal, and her father, they were being shot out of the sky by a gang of cutthroats. This week, we see that they managed to don parachutes and bail out just in the nick of time. Whew! Good for them.
Dad vows to recover the railroad's gold so he can use it to clear his name of the false charges leveled against him. He refuses his daughter's pleas to reveal his true identity to the Duke, who thinks he's just a railroad detective. Wayne borrows a car to see about getting the gold out of the plane wreck, but the villains take the stolen locomotive and arrive in time to get the jump on him. Both parties don’t know that the gold has already been removed.
Wayne manages to escape with a sample of the gold he found on the ground; racing along a trestle, he manages to avoid a serious accident in the nick of time. He should really be more careful; he's a role model for a generation of movie fans, you know.

The bad guys board the train and spot Wayne’s girlfriend. They decide to call one of their friends to meet her at the station in a fake taxicab. Their plan works, and she’s kidnapped and taken to a ramshackle warehouse near the RR station. There, she at last meets the Wrecker face to face: Walter Gray, head of the RR’s rival airline!
He threatens her with a big owwie if she doesn’t tell them where the gold is, but Wayne has followed her and beats up the lot of them. The Wrecker escapes, but Wayne follows him and a terrific battle ensues.
The Wrecker loses his mask (he isn’t REALLY Walter Gray, it seems) but Wayne is knocked unconscious onto the tracks and here comes a train! Talk about a big owwie!

I don't know about you folks, but I don't see how I can stand the suspense for a whole week. And NEXT week a big businessman is found murdered -- and his beautiful secretary comes under suspicion. Can she clear her name and find the real killer? Don't miss Detective Kitty O'Day, next week In The Balcony!

And now... OUR FEATURE PRESENTATION!

Credits by the company that made refrigerator magnets, apparently. And for heaven's sake, Elmer Bernstein might actually turn out to BE somebody someday. Spell his name right!
Just to give you a head’s up: this film has a reputation of being a giant egg-laying turkey, but you’re not going to here that from us here In The Balcony. We love it! Shaky science aside, it’s a fast-moving little 64 min. picture with lotsa women in tight black leotards. A perfect matinee feature. In the far future, a U.S. expedition heads for the moon. On board is Captain Sonny Tufts, his girlfriend and Chief Navigator Marie Windsor, First Mate Victory Jory, and crewmembers “Doug” and “Walt”. You can tell Walt isn’t going to survive this trip ten seconds after you meet him.
There’s trouble down below, but Jory dons his spacesuit and fixes it. For that, he tries to weasel a smooch from the Captain’s girl, but she’s not having any. She’ll flirt with him, but that’s as far as THIS navigator goes, buster.
The wonderful moonscapes are the creation of the great Chesley Bonestell; Filmfax magazine has recently done about 250 articles about him (in between 1,000 pages of ads per quarter for Filmfax merchandise).
This is the moon. It is NOT a shot of the Chief Balconeer's face during those awful acne-prone years. Just wanted to clarify that. The film was originally in 3-D, so these craters must've looked impressive.
Sonny Tufts and Marie Windsor are yuckin' it up. Note the corrugated steel backdrop. We predict in the future, ALL spacecraft will have corrrugated steel walls.
The crew gets really testy with each other, besides the obvious sexual tension between Victor and Marie. My hunch is that all that office furniture on rollers tended to bang against the sides of the bunks while the crew was trying to sleep. If the projectionist happens to be looking for a missing empty film reel, why, there it is, right up on the spacecraft's wall!
Marie finds a spot on the cusp of the dark side of the moon for the ship to land on; she knows that it’s a perfect place, but doesn’t know why. They don their suits and walk on the moon, but nobody thinks to say anything memorable.
Marie also knows that there’s a cave on the other side of that hill over there that they just HAVE to investigate. Jory is suspicious, but what do you expect from HIM? He played the Shadow!

Turns out the cave has oxygen, so they can take off their spacesuits and Marie can light a Camel. Yes, really. There are two things a lady should never be without in her purse, and apparently a pack of ciggies is the other one.
Marie knows her way around the moon like a native, right up until the time that she blunders into not one, but TWO giant spiders. Luckily, Jory brought his revolver (!) and the fiendish "moonrachnids" are obliterated. We wax poetic, no?
Marching ever forwards, the crew discovers a hidden city deep in the bowels of the moon. Their words, not mine.
Daring explorers that they are, they press forward to investigate, determined not to turn back. Especially once they discover they can't leave the cave: somebody stole their spacesuits!
The great hall looks like a cross between Mt. Olympus and the original set of American Bandstand. Oh, look! A Cat-Woman attacks Doug! No, no, no! Bad Kitty! Mustn't do that!
The Cat-Women! These lovely ladies are portrayed by the “Hollywood Cover Girls”, which was apparently just a promotional gimmick: they were a group of would-be starlets who worked cheap. And looked it.
It turns out that they’ve been controlling Marie’s mind; they can’t control men’s minds (I think they’re probably looking in the wrong place) but since all their moon men are dead, that’s little drawback.
They intend to seduce the men into telling them how to work the spaceship, then they’re going to kill them all. Marie doesn’t really seem to mind. This is the seductive "Dance of the Cat-Women". Can you hear me purring?
I sure hope Animala, a/k/a In The Balcony's Ms. Monogram 2006, is watching this! She's a Cat-Woman at heart, you know. Beta takes Walt back to the ship so big stwong man can show itsy bitsy Cat-Woman how big impwessive ship weally fwies. She picks it up fast. “You’re too smart for me, baby!” he exclaims. “I like ’em dumb.” Beta then sneaks up behind him and stabs him to death. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
Lambda asks Doug if he has a “special Earth woman” back home. She says that she’d like to sit on the beach with him and drink a Coke. Yes, she does. No, really, I’m not making that up. She really does. Lambda the Cat-Woman wants a Coke with Doug.
Jory warns his crewmates not to trust the Cat-Women and talks some smack to Alpha, their leader, but Marie tells Alpha, “Pay no attention to him! He’s only the co-pilot!” Ouch.
“Love isn’t a faucet – you can’t turn it on and off!” Victor explains helpfully to Marie. Lamba returns the spacesuits to Doug, so Alpha kills her. This is Doug's goodbye kiss. Tissues are available in the lobby as you exit.
The producers ran out of money, so the finale happens off-screen. "Doug! The Cat-Women are dead!" Jory yells from the wings. They return to earth, Marie having decided that Victor Jory is preferable to Sonny Tufts. Well, hell. We could've told her that.

	Ooh, baby, today we’ve got one classic cartoon for you, directed by Tex Avery and released in 1955. A crusty old sea salt weaves a tale about a cute li’l penguin and a dumb but tenacious polar bear that are after fish from the hold of a ship stuck on an ice floe.
There’s this ferocious watchdog guarding the fish, see. He sleeps a lot, but Chilly keeps waking him up. Dog bites bear, bear sings “Rock-a-Bye Baby”, dog goes back to sleep. Then the cycle begins again.		Say, in that hat Chilly looks a bit like Michael Nesmith, no?
	Chilly Willy isn’t what I’d call a personable little guy, and according to Leonard Maltin, Tex Avery never quite knew what to do with him. Studio brass liked him, though, so Chilly stayed. Actually, Chilly outlasted Tex at the studio.
The cartoon never quite explains where Chilly gets the dynamite and anvil and stuff, but sometimes you just have to let art flow over you. In any case, a penguin battling a polar bear needs all the help he can get.		Rockabye Point was nominated for an Oscar; it lost to Speedy Gonzales (Warner Bros.).
	My favorite moment is when the bear gets an anvil dropped on his head… he then (to remain quiet) writes the word OUCH on a piece of paper, followed by an *%$(# (the universal cartoon language for “expletive deleted”).
In the end, bear and dog end up trapped on an iceberg, where they live happily ever after. A little too happily, if you ask me.		The Legend of Rockabye Point is available on the Woody Woodpecker & Friends DVDs from Columbia House.

	Hey, Joe McDoakes – the average man – joins us this week In The Balcony. That’s him over there behind the eight ball. See? Just an average joe.
Joe and his wife are faced with an evil landlord who wants them out so he can raise the rent. He’s cut their electricity, heat, and gas, and tells them he’s redecorating their apartment by putting up yellow wallpaper with big monkey pictures and cutting a hole in their floor for an elevator.		Joe is off to find an apartment but has a series of misadventures, including finding an apartment the size of a shoebox and losing $100 to a landlord in a harebrained “bet” that he couldn’t find a vacant room.
	So You Want an Apartment was released in 1948, when the postwar housing crunch faced many young ex-GIs looking for apartments for themselves and their new families.
George O’Hanlon and Jane Harker play McDoakes and wife; George would have several Mrs. over the years, including Phyllis “Lois Lane” Coates.		O'Hanlon's voice is easily recognizable even if these films are not: he went on to be the voice of George Jetson!
	Finally, Joe goes to an apartment broker (“We operate the whitest black market in town!”) who rents him his own apartment again – now with elevator and monkey wallpaper.
The Joe McDoakes series ran for dozens of films from 1942 to 1956.		So You Want an Apartment is not currently available on video or DVD.

	When we last left our hero, his gal, and her father, they were being shot out of the sky by a gang of cutthroats. This week, we see that they managed to don parachutes and bail out just in the nick of time. Whew! Good for them.
Dad vows to recover the railroad's gold so he can use it to clear his name of the false charges leveled against him. He refuses his daughter's pleas to reveal his true identity to the Duke, who thinks he's just a railroad detective.		Wayne borrows a car to see about getting the gold out of the plane wreck, but the villains take the stolen locomotive and arrive in time to get the jump on him. Both parties don’t know that the gold has already been removed.
	Wayne manages to escape with a sample of the gold he found on the ground; racing along a trestle, he manages to avoid a serious accident in the nick of time. He should really be more careful; he's a role model for a generation of movie fans, you know.
The bad guys board the train and spot Wayne’s girlfriend. They decide to call one of their friends to meet her at the station in a fake taxicab. Their plan works, and she’s kidnapped and taken to a ramshackle warehouse near the RR station. There, she at last meets the Wrecker face to face: Walter Gray, head of the RR’s rival airline!		He threatens her with a big owwie if she doesn’t tell them where the gold is, but Wayne has followed her and beats up the lot of them. The Wrecker escapes, but Wayne follows him and a terrific battle ensues.
	The Wrecker loses his mask (he isn’t REALLY Walter Gray, it seems) but Wayne is knocked unconscious onto the tracks and here comes a train! Talk about a big owwie!

	Credits by the company that made refrigerator magnets, apparently. And for heaven's sake, Elmer Bernstein might actually turn out to BE somebody someday. Spell his name right!
Just to give you a head’s up: this film has a reputation of being a giant egg-laying turkey, but you’re not going to here that from us here In The Balcony. We love it! Shaky science aside, it’s a fast-moving little 64 min. picture with lotsa women in tight black leotards. A perfect matinee feature.		In the far future, a U.S. expedition heads for the moon. On board is Captain Sonny Tufts, his girlfriend and Chief Navigator Marie Windsor, First Mate Victory Jory, and crewmembers “Doug” and “Walt”. You can tell Walt isn’t going to survive this trip ten seconds after you meet him.
	There’s trouble down below, but Jory dons his spacesuit and fixes it. For that, he tries to weasel a smooch from the Captain’s girl, but she’s not having any. She’ll flirt with him, but that’s as far as THIS navigator goes, buster.
The wonderful moonscapes are the creation of the great Chesley Bonestell; Filmfax magazine has recently done about 250 articles about him (in between 1,000 pages of ads per quarter for Filmfax merchandise).		This is the moon. It is NOT a shot of the Chief Balconeer's face during those awful acne-prone years. Just wanted to clarify that. The film was originally in 3-D, so these craters must've looked impressive.
	Sonny Tufts and Marie Windsor are yuckin' it up. Note the corrugated steel backdrop. We predict in the future, ALL spacecraft will have corrrugated steel walls.
The crew gets really testy with each other, besides the obvious sexual tension between Victor and Marie. My hunch is that all that office furniture on rollers tended to bang against the sides of the bunks while the crew was trying to sleep.		If the projectionist happens to be looking for a missing empty film reel, why, there it is, right up on the spacecraft's wall!
	Marie finds a spot on the cusp of the dark side of the moon for the ship to land on; she knows that it’s a perfect place, but doesn’t know why. They don their suits and walk on the moon, but nobody thinks to say anything memorable.
Marie also knows that there’s a cave on the other side of that hill over there that they just HAVE to investigate. Jory is suspicious, but what do you expect from HIM? He played the Shadow!		Turns out the cave has oxygen, so they can take off their spacesuits and Marie can light a Camel. Yes, really. There are two things a lady should never be without in her purse, and apparently a pack of ciggies is the other one.
	Marie knows her way around the moon like a native, right up until the time that she blunders into not one, but TWO giant spiders. Luckily, Jory brought his revolver (!) and the fiendish "moonrachnids" are obliterated. We wax poetic, no?
Marching ever forwards, the crew discovers a hidden city deep in the bowels of the moon. Their words, not mine.		Daring explorers that they are, they press forward to investigate, determined not to turn back. Especially once they discover they can't leave the cave: somebody stole their spacesuits!
	The great hall looks like a cross between Mt. Olympus and the original set of American Bandstand. Oh, look! A Cat-Woman attacks Doug! No, no, no! Bad Kitty! Mustn't do that!
The Cat-Women! These lovely ladies are portrayed by the “Hollywood Cover Girls”, which was apparently just a promotional gimmick: they were a group of would-be starlets who worked cheap. And looked it.		It turns out that they’ve been controlling Marie’s mind; they can’t control men’s minds (I think they’re probably looking in the wrong place) but since all their moon men are dead, that’s little drawback.
	They intend to seduce the men into telling them how to work the spaceship, then they’re going to kill them all. Marie doesn’t really seem to mind. This is the seductive "Dance of the Cat-Women". Can you hear me purring?
I sure hope Animala, a/k/a In The Balcony's Ms. Monogram 2006, is watching this! She's a Cat-Woman at heart, you know.		Beta takes Walt back to the ship so big stwong man can show itsy bitsy Cat-Woman how big impwessive ship weally fwies. She picks it up fast. “You’re too smart for me, baby!” he exclaims. “I like ’em dumb.” Beta then sneaks up behind him and stabs him to death. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
	Lambda asks Doug if he has a “special Earth woman” back home. She says that she’d like to sit on the beach with him and drink a Coke. Yes, she does. No, really, I’m not making that up. She really does. Lambda the Cat-Woman wants a Coke with Doug.
Jory warns his crewmates not to trust the Cat-Women and talks some smack to Alpha, their leader, but Marie tells Alpha, “Pay no attention to him! He’s only the co-pilot!” Ouch.		“Love isn’t a faucet – you can’t turn it on and off!” Victor explains helpfully to Marie. Lamba returns the spacesuits to Doug, so Alpha kills her. This is Doug's goodbye kiss. Tissues are available in the lobby as you exit.
	The producers ran out of money, so the finale happens off-screen. "Doug! The Cat-Women are dead!" Jory yells from the wings. They return to earth, Marie having decided that Victor Jory is preferable to Sonny Tufts. Well, hell. We could've told her that.