Monday Lethargy

EDITOR'S NOTE: SO LITTLE GETUPANDGO ON THIS FINE MONDAY, SOMEONE MIGHT NEED TO CHECK MY PULSE.

SO HERE'S A TAD BIT OF DWEEBISHNESS, RANDOM, POINTLESS, BLAH BLAH BLAH.....

Connery Takes Call to Return as Bond
Word is going around that none other than Sean Connery has agreed to provide the voice of Bond in Electronic Arts' James Bond 007: From Russia With Love.

Connery will apparently be "recording the full voice track in the Caribbean during the next few weeks."

EA is using Connery's likeness for Bond in the game, and the story will follow the film's plot fairly closely.

The game will ship in either late 2005 or early 2006 on Xbox, PlayStation 2 and GameCube. EDITOR'S NOTE: GLAD TO SEE DADDY'S WORKING. (STOCKING THE INHERITANCE).

AND HERE'S A WEIRD BIT OF MISCELLANY.....

A rare screening reveals the hidden Dr. Seuss
A rare screening reveals the hidden Dr. Seuss
Dr. Seuss' wartime cartoons played on racist stereotypes about Japanese and Germans.



Dr. Seuss sure was funny. Who can forget the inspired rhymes and surreal drawings of "Green Eggs and Ham" and "The Cat in the Hat"?

And what about his animated films featuring bare breasts, big butts and double entendres?

Haven't seen those? Well, the good doctor was more creative than most people realize.

Years before Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904-1991) gained worldwide acclaim for his children's books, he honed his craft making cartoons for other young minds: American soldiers.

Racy and suggestive, the animated films are enough to shatter one's innocent appraisal of such Seuss titles as "The Seven Lady Godivas," "Hop on Pop" and -- say it isn't so -- "There's a Wocket in My Pocket!"

The short military-training cartoons, along with disturbing propaganda films that Seuss also worked on, were shown to troops during and shortly after World War II. Although most copies of the movies were destroyed, a few dozen people in San Francisco were lucky enough to see several of them over the weekend when Dennis Nyback, a New York film curator, was in town to screen them in a touring program he calls "The Dark Side of Dr. Seuss."

"You know, most people are complicated," Nyback says. "There's this view of Dr. Seuss that's pretty much two-dimensional."

Fittingly enough, Seuss' little-known films were shown at Oddball Film+Video, an archival space in the Mission District that is itself little known. (Its Web site is http://www.oddballfilm.com/.) Also the home of the nonprofit San Francisco Media Archive, it's a hidden-away and homey outfit that houses roughly 50,000 films -- everything from "Alcohol -- How Much Is Too Much?" to "Seed Dispersal" -- on shelves that nearly touch 13-foot ceilings.

"I have somewhat of an obsessive nature," explains Stephen Parr, the archive's director.

At Oddball, any dreamy childhood vision of a wholesome, grandfatherly Dr. Seuss quickly disappeared when Parr got the projector rolling at the event, lit only by candles. The screen brightened and was soon filled with the cartoon image of a jolly, jug-eared dunce.

His name: Private Snafu. As the film's narrator coyly announces, that stands for "situation normal, all fffouled up."

Private Snafu was the rather crafty creation of Col. Frank Capra, who during World War II ran the Armed Forces Motion Picture Unit. (He also made something of a name for himself by directing such movies as "It's a Wonderful Life.") Seuss (then known as Lt. Col. Geisel) headed the animation unit and wrote the Snafu scripts. EDITOR'S NOTE: HOW'S THAT FOR A BIT OF TRIVIA?! CAPRA AND SEUSS! NOT THE LIKELIEST OF PAIRINGS, EH? (LEAVE IT TO THE US ARMY TO CREATE SUCH AND ODDBALL COUPLE)

In enlisting Seuss' services, the Army was able to stop making deadly dull training films and instead put useful information across while making the young troops bust their guts laughing. Or so one imagines: It must have been pretty uproarious in the 1940s for young men in their late teens to see Snafu (voiced by the inimitable Mel BlancEDITOR'S NOTE: !!!) flirting with a big-eyed doll whose breasts and butt conceal bombs. (Lesson: "If you are a boob, you will be trapped.")

In another short, "Target Snafu," an army of mosquitoes carrying malaria descends on our dumb hero's bare bum. And in "Rumors," Snafu misinterprets a joke he hears in the latrine; he thinks his base is under attack. The rumor spreads -- in the form of very Seussian flying baloney sausages.

Although Seuss opposed what he called the "dissemination of stupidity" --
in his lifetime he championed progressive causes, condemning, for one, anti- Semitism -- some of his most unsettling cartoons include stereotypical and racist depictions of slanted-eyed, bucktoothed Japanese soldiers.

EDITOR'S NOTE: APOLOGIES, BUT EXAMPLE.....


Nyback has an explanation for why more people aren't familiar with Seuss' wartime work: "I don't think his estate particularly wants to promote it," he deadpans. EDITOR'S NOTE: YEAH, WELL DUH.

The more serious stuff that Seuss put out -- the movies that seemingly have little to do with the former editorial cartoonist for PM, a left-wing New York newspaper -- are propaganda films Seuss also wrote for the U.S. Armed Forces. Two screened at Oddball Film+Video are the scathing and fear-mongering "Your Job in Germany" and "Our Job in Japan."

Both films show gruesome images of war victims and suggest that those countries are made up of naturally bellicose people who must be tamed. For the film on Germany, Seuss wrote these words: "The German people are not our friends. ... Trust none of them." Interestingly, Seuss was a German American; as a child, his nickname was "the Kaiser."

In the film on Japan, the narrator implies that "the Japanese brain" is to blame for their wars.

The Americans, the narrator proudly proclaims, have the answer: "We can prove that most Americans don't believe in pushing people around -- even when we're on top."

That line, more than anything said by a goofy cartoon character, drew one of the biggest laughs of the night from the audience. EDITOR'S NOTE: IN A SORT OF LAUGHING-AT-OUR-PAIN WAY, NO DOUBT.

Hear that, Horton?