{"id":2046,"date":"2011-04-25T08:26:22","date_gmt":"2011-04-25T13:26:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatsociety.org\/?p=2046"},"modified":"2018-10-30T15:18:01","modified_gmt":"2018-10-30T19:18:01","slug":"what-was-found","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/?p=2046","title":{"rendered":"What Was Found"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, there we go. Ten years of Greatsociety<\/a>. Archived articles, retrospectives from our Confederate dead, an intensely insular nerdgasm about the 20 best sci-fi films, and now we\u2019re in the home stretch.
\n<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t have anything in mind for this week, really. The days were held in reserve for proposed retrospectives and continuing top 20 sci-fi arguments that didn\u2019t quite materialize, so then I figured I\u2019d just end the anniversary month quietly.<\/p>\n

One thing that came up, as retrospectives were being discussed and we were all traipsing around in the archives \u2013 the most recent of which can be found here in the GS Tomb<\/a> \u2013 was the dated nature of many of the articles. How have things changed over the years? And I landed on the 2003 article What Was Lost<\/a>, where I pined for DVD releases of obscure childhood shows.<\/p>\n

There are still missing shows even further behind the curtain of lost culture \u2013 I\u2019m looking now for\u00a0Voyagers!<\/em> and\u00a0Misfits of Science<\/em> — but I\u2019ve ended my search for those series with the knowledge that they, too, will soon be released.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Voyagers!<\/em>, indeed, has been released. Certainly not as watchable and entertaining as I remembered it being when I was seven! Misfits of Science<\/em>, though, remains elusive. In 2008, it was released in Germany in a boxset that included an unaired episode, but hasn\u2019t made it to Region One yet. If I were ambitious, I\u2019d spend the small amount of money needed to get a DVD player that could handle multi-region discs\u2026 But I don\u2019t even own a TV, and I download everything these days anyway. Between Netflix and piracy, stepping down to actually purchase a DVD feels like some sort of quaint, country custom. Put the axe handle under the bed, hang the eggs from the trees, spin three times widdershins, and make that DVD order!<\/p>\n

These final missing links are: The softcore flick\u00a0Young Lady Chatterley<\/em> starring Harlee McBride, and the sequel with Adam West;\u00a0 Michael Pataki\u2019s softcore version of\u00a0Cinderella <\/em>with Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith; a 15 minute animation sequence set to Ravel\u2019s Bolero that, until recently, was unnamed; a short lived Britcom series titled\u00a0Phil & Arthur Go Off<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Young Lady Chatterley<\/em> has seen intermittent DVD releases since, and I did grab a copy, and an old VHS rip of part two \u2013 soft core porn with Adam West! \u2013 off of a torrent site. Cinderella <\/em>is, also, available as a weird VHS rip. But it\u2019s a movie that demands a proper release, if only for the Snapping Pussy song. The songs get a nice mention here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Phil and Arthur Go Off<\/em> is also something I\u2019ve been hunting down for, oh, 26 years now. Talk about seeking a mythical white stag, eh?<\/p>\n

When it comes to white stags, I had thought, so many years later, that the one thing I would never get my hands on would be the animated short that was only ever aired as filler in between late night movies on The Movie Channel (TMC).<\/p>\n

\u2026 I found myself landing on TMC fairly often.\u00a0 The channel\u2019s overall taste in movies synced up with what I was looking for.\u00a0 They insisted on showing films on the hour, though, so they seemed to have an exhaustive library of weird filler to round out the time between movies.
\nA mesmerizing animated short popped up every month or so.\u00a0 It not only turned me onto classical music, but it was a mystery.\u00a0 It was never named, never explained.\u00a0 My search for it began back there in the 80\u2019s and not until this year did I actually find the source.\u00a0 In the short, a coke bottle thrown from a spaceship lands in a pool of muck, sparking an evolutionary march across a wild and surreal landscape that starts with slime and ends with the horrors of apocalyptic humanity as a complete version of Bolero rises and, then, pounds along. Strange creatures, constantly marching forward, morph into others along an imaginary evolutionary chain, always haunted by a monkey who swings from back to back, tree to tree, ever observant until it\u2019s his turn to brutally take control. It\u2019s pulse-pounding and mesmerizing.
\nIt\u2019s from\u00a0Allegro Non Troppo<\/em>\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019ve since gotten my hands on the full version of Allegro Non Troppo<\/a><\/em>, and it\u2019s generally disappointing. Why just one 15 minute section had been hacked out, and why it was played randomly on TMC without introduction or credits, will remain one of early cable TV\u2019s mysteries, I suppose.<\/p>\n

I miss those simple days, though. Where you had only a handful of channels, and that was okay. You stumbled across weird things naturally, surfing through the four, or six, or, if you were well off, 30 or so channels. That\u2019s how I discovered Space: 1999<\/em>, repackaged in 79 and 80 into a series of TV movies. That\u2019s how I stumbled across Doctor Who<\/em>, late at night on PBS, and Arthur and Phil<\/em> on A&E in a slot TV Guide labelled only as \u00a0“local programming.” In short order, “Local Programming” on cable channels became something for me to keep an eye on. You never knew what you’d run across.<\/p>\n

And, after some Andy Sidaris movie finished at 10:40pm on a Saturday night and while you waited for the next flick to start at 11pm, they\u2019d shoehorn in some weird animated short into the slot. A childhood mind rotted by the Sidaris movie that just aired suddenly taught a love for classical music and weird apocalyptic allegory.<\/p>\n

So\u2026 Instead of hunting these things down, since I\u2019m sure you haven\u2019t heard of some of them, I\u2019ll give you the same experience I had as a child. Late at night, in front of Greatsociety\u2026and here comes this weird shit thrown up just for the sake of filler.<\/p>\n

[youtube=http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=aSEJC-cVPuA]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, there we go. Ten years of Greatsociety. Archived articles, retrospectives from our Confederate dead, an intensely insular nerdgasm about the 20 best sci-fi films, and now we\u2019re in the home stretch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,273],"tags":[312,314,313,403,274,311],"class_list":["post-2046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cult-culture","category-gs-10th-anniversary-2001-2011","tag-allegro-non-troppo","tag-cheryl-smith","tag-cinderella","tag-cult-culture","tag-gs-10th-anniversary","tag-young-lady-chatterley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2046"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2062,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2046\/revisions\/2062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}