The Golden State (1948)
Article 5844 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-12-2020
Directed by Seymour Kneitl and Dave Tendlar
Featuring the voices of Charles Irving, Jack Mercer and Sid Raymonf
Country: USA
What it is: Screen Song

Enjoy some jokes about California, and then follow the bouncing ball for a round of “California, Here I Come”.

I wouldn’t say Famous Studio’s Screen Songs are necessarily awful, but I do consider them forgettable non-events in the history of animation. Like the other ones, it’s a series of blackout gags about its subject, followed by a “follow the bouncing ball” singalong. Here’s another one that squeaks by on the fantastic content list by having one of the gags involve dancing skeletons. Isn’t it nice we live in a world where we can fast forward to this scene and then skip the whole singalong? For dancing skeleton completists only.

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II (1993)
aka Gojira vs. Mekagojira
Article 5843 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-9-2020
Directed by Takao Okawara and Kazuki Ohmori
Featuring Masahiro Takashima, Ryoko Sano, Megumi Odaka
Country: Japan
What it is: Godzilla movie

When a baby Godzilla is hatched in Japan, Godzilla shows up to claim it. This gives the military its chance to battle it with their new weapon – a giant robot known as Mechagodzilla.

The II in the title is there only to differentiate it from the similarly titled 1974 movie; this is not a sequel to that one. Rodan also shows up in this movie, though in some ways the role he plays feels like it might be more appropriate for Mothra. The baby Godzilla is far less cloying here than in the earlier series; nor is it as cutesy as the one in the immediate sequel to this one. I’m a little disappointed by Mechagodzilla here; I prefer the pyrotechnics of the earlier versions, and I miss the finger missiles it used to launch. The story is a bit of an improvement, and it manages to give the girl with the ESP connection to Godzilla a little more to do than is usually the case. Overall, it’s one of the better entries in the Heisei series, but I do find that whole series seems to melt together in my mind in a way that the original run of Godzilla movies doesn’t.

Godzilla Fantasia (1984)
aka Gojira Fantaji: SF Kokyo Fantaji
Article 5842 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-7-2020
Directed by various
No listed cast
Country: Japan
What it is: Long music video

If there’d been a plot, I’d have summarized it here.

For those who don’t recognize this particular title from the Godzilla series, here’s a bit of explanation. At one point, composer Akira Ifukube composed a three-movement symphony based on the scores he wrote for several Toho fantasy films, many (but not all) of which featured Godzilla. This movie consists of a performance of that symphony together with the movie scenes for which the music was originally written. There are apparently several versions of this movie with two sections available. One is a performance of a synthesizer version of the symphony with other scenes from the movies, and a third consisted of scenes from movies later than 1984. My copy features the original symphony and the synthesizer version, but not the third sequence (which must necessarily postdate the 1984 year listed here). The original symphonic version is easily the best of these; plus, at about forty minutes, it finishes up before the whole thing gets tiresome. The synthesizer version feels redundant, and occasionally features noise and talking from the footage it shows; it even uses some of the same footage as the symphonic version at one point. There’s at least one scene that appears to be from some historical movie I can’t identify. If you’re keen on Ifukube’s scores, this can be a fun movie; for Godzilla fans, it’s optional; after all, you won’t be seeing any Godzilla footage you probably haven’t seen before.

Gifts from the Air (1937)
Article 5841 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-4-2020
Directed by Ben Harrison
Featuring the Radio Rogues
Country: USA
What it is: Christmas whimsy

A poor boy retrieves a discarded broken toy from a toy shop, takes it home, and decides to have a real Christmas. Towards that end, the broken toy calls Santa over the radio…

Between the sentient toys and a visit from Santa Claus, this Christmas cartoon short has enough fantastic content to qualify for a review. And, despite a lowly 5.2 rating on IMDB at the time I wrote this, I must say that I rather liked this one. That may be because of what the short DOESN’T do rather than what it does; the opening scenes of a penniless young boy looking into a toy shop window on Christmas Eve had me thinking we were going into “The Little Match Girl” territory, but fortunately, the cartoon does not go that route, and aims for whimsy instead. I do like the way the boy makes do with what he has to create a Christmas atmosphere in his hovel. I’m less taken with the ending, where a bunch of the toys he receives from Santa are featured, and the short goes into celebrity caricature mode. The trouble is, most of these celebrities are rather obscure nowadays (the only one I knew right off the bat was Ed Wynn), nor does the cartoon do anything really creative with them. Ultimately, the cartoon is a piece of fluff, but I was in the right mood for it.

Ghost Parade (1931)
Article 5840 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-2-2020
Directed by Mack Sennett
Featuring Andy Clyde, Marjorie Beebe, Harry Gribbon
Country: USA
What it is: …

A realtor visits a haunted house. He gets scared.

I’ve seen a lot of bad comedies for this series, and one way to classify them is how you feel after watching them. Some of them leave you feel insulted. Some of them leave you bored. Some of them leave you angry at your time having been wasted. But to my mind, the worst are the ones that leave you feeling depressed. I’m afraid this is one of the latter.

This short is almost entirely a compendium of people acting scared when scary things happen, but the scares aren’t scary, and the being scared isn’t funny. It feels as if virtually no effort was made to tell a coherent story; arbitrary things happen and people react. Practically everything here feels desperate, forced, lazy and/or sloppy, as if everyone involved is either only putting in enough effort to pull a paycheck or are hoping that something somewhere in this mess will work. After it was all over, I felt sad and embarrassed, not amused in the least. Yes, it may all be an overreaction to what is really no more than a bad comedy short, but that’s how I felt. Really, this one isn’t worth watching.

Georgie and the Dragon (1951)
Article 5839 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-31-2020
Directed by Robert Cannon and John Hubley
Voice cast unknown
Country: USA
What it is: Whimsical UPA cartoon

A lonely Scottish boy finds a tiny dragon and intends to ask his father if he can keep it as a pet. However, the tiny pet grows very swiftly…

UPA wasn’t quite able to compete with Looney Tunes in terms of comedy, but they do a fairly solid job on this whimsical cartoon. The humor grows out of the fact that despite the fact the dragon does all sorts of damage (to both the house and the father), the father never actually sees the dragon, no matter how big it gets. It’s all a set-up for the ending, which I won’t reveal here. It’s an amusing enough cartoon, but I do find that many of UPA’s cartoons don’t call me back in the way Warner Brothers’ cartoons do, despite the stylistic touches. However, they are truly superior to the cartoons Columbia put out before UPA came on board.

Gandy’s Dream Girl (1944)
Article 5838 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-29-2020
Directed by Mannie Davis
Voice cast unknown
Country: USA
What it is: Terrytoons Gandy Goose cartoon

Sourpuss sees a photograph of Gandy’s dream girl, and wants the goose to introduce him to her, but Gandy only encounters the girl in his dreams. So Sourpuss enters Gandy’s dream in a bid to meet the girl.

It seems like quite a few of these Gandy Goose cartoons slop over into fantastic content above and beyond the anthropomorphic animal thing; since this one involves characters entering other people’s dreams, it qualifies. I have to give Terrytoons credit here; that’s a fairly novel concept for a cartoon, and they beat Warner Brothers to the same idea by two years (THE BIG SNOOZE was from 1946). The novelty of the concept as well as a few creative decisions in how Gandy’s dream world manifests itself make this easily the best of the Gandy Goose cartoons I’ve seen so far. Gandy himself is a bit dull, but his cohort Sourpuss (who is really the main character here) is much more useful from a story perspective. This is definitely one of the better Terrytoons cartoons, but I do have trouble figuring out how Gandy managed to get a photograph of a girl he only meets in his dreams.

The Galaxy Invader (1985)
Article 5837 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-27-2020
Directed by Don Dohler
Featuring Richard Ruxton, Faye Tilles, George Stover
Country: USA
What it is: Made on a budget

The landing of a UFO in the woods attracts the attention of a boy who calls in a scientist friend to investigate. It also catches the attention of a pair of rednecks who plan to become rich by capturing the alien.

There are some movies where you can point to the exact moment when you knew just what the whole movie was going to be like. This is one of them, and that moment occurred very early on when I saw the name of “Dan Dohler” in the credits. Having seen this man’s THE ALIEN FACTOR and FIEND, I was all prepared for a foray into extreme low budget cinema, sincere but dodgy acting, and since most of the plot descriptions prominently feature the word “redneck”, I figured this would have an extra layer of dumb added to the proceedings. And that’s pretty much what I got here; if anything, it looks even chintzier than THE ALIEN FACTOR, and since the main character is an unpleasant violent drunk who loves shooting guns, it’s really not that much fun. Still, I do find Dohler’s movies easier to bear than, say, Bill Rebane’s; they’re nowhere near as depressing. Still, I have to say that this is the weakest of Dohler’s films I’ve seen to date.