I took a stroll through animation history last night with Eric’s Insomniac Theater — I watched Winsor McCay’s “Gertie the Dinosaur” (1914) and his unfinished sequel, “Gertie on Tour” (1921).
A version of it was actually part of McCay’s earlier vaudeville act; he “interacted” with his artistic creation on stage. The version you see here shows McCay presenting his character to some friends at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. (It was shot on location — and that made this short a little neater for me, as the museum was my favorite place to go as a boy.)
Can you imagine what McCay, a pioneering animator of his time, would think of the modern “Jurassic World” movies? Or what about today’s mind-numbing animation on “Love, Death + Robots?”
I just need a Halloween horror playlist, though. I’ve already seen this year’s “Castle Rock” and (of course) the second season of “Mr. Mercedes.”
“Vampire” (1979) and “The Last Broadcast” (1998) both come highly recommended by some horror-fan friends that I truly trust. I also believe that I have never seen any of the classic Universal Studios monster movies in their entirety. I’ve watched bits and pieces of a couple of them on television when I was a young kid, including “Creature From the Black Lagoon” (1954) and “The Invisible Man” (1933). When I was a tot in the very late 70’s, the studio’s Gothic monsters were still very much a part of the zeitgeist … my older brother even had the Aurora model kits. I finally enjoyed F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” for the first time a couple of years ago, but of course the 1921 German film preceded the Universal movies, which re-imagined Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” entirely in 1931.
I’ll probably start first by trying to hunt down a copy of “The Wolf Man” (1941). That’s the one that other everyone always recommends.
The caption reads: “A termagant wife may, therefore, in some respects, be considered a tolerable blessing, and if so, Rip Van Winkle was thrice blessed.”
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 