News From the DPiMR Facebook Page...

I just posted some stuff over there, enough that I thought I should share it here. Here's the link to it, and a taste:

Seriously, how are you not there already?

The Monster Movie Sensation of 1986!

Today I present a Maxrat Video Production from 1986. It's called "Giganticus Vs. Monchhichi."

MVP was the name my friends and I used when making stupid short films with our video cameras. (I had once owned a mouse named Max, but for the purposes of naming our production house we upgraded him to a rat.) There was about a two-year period where we made our videos pretty regularly. It was me, my friend Mike, his brother Jim and Jim's friend Chris. Mike and I were seventeen, the others two years younger. As with our basement band, The Martyrs, the others had the ball rolling and I came late to the whole enterprise--often literally, as I was the first of our quartet to discover alcohol. I generally drank on a weekend night, with another, somewhat less nerdly set of friends. The next afternoon, hopefully after sleeping off a hangover, I'd get picked up by Mike in his brown Corolla (I didn't have a license yet, as the prospect on driving among Long Island lunatics frightened me) and we'd go to his house for either "rocking out" or "making a movie."

Many of our productions were populated with imbecilic characters based on dopey people we knew. We rarely bothered to change their names, so there are very few of these videos I would put online. This one, instead of being offensive to specific people, is merely insensitive to the entire Asian race. It was meant to be a spoof of Japanese monster movies, with ridiculous special effects--as if we had a choice--and terrible dubbing. (We had probably just figured out how to use the "audio dub" feature.) As usual, we made it up as we went along, ensuring that it wouldn't make a lick of fucking sense. But then, by the time we got around to dubbing it, we'd forgotten all the dialogue we had planned, so that adds an extra layer of amateurishness to this mess. Eagle-eyed viewers will note that the featured cuddly toy is not a Monchhichi, but some cheap knock-off. It kind of looks like Buddy Hackett.

My performance is pretty terrible. I'm the guy in the striped purple dress shirt with an "I Survived Catholic School" t-shirt underneath. I kept forgetting that it wasn't a silent movie, so I frequently gesture and make faces without actually bothering to move my lips for the later dubbing. I do like my sound effects, however, provided by some LP I owned. I'm not listing this on YouTube publicly because there may be music copyright issues, as I had added "Give Back My Man" by the B-52's at the start.

Kid - Jim
Kid's Older Brother - Me
Old Man / Boy Who Becomes Giganticus - Chris
Voice of Kid's Brother - Mike
Camera Operator - probably mostly Mike because he's not in it
Writer/Director - just kidding

New York Daily Metro, 1978 (Part 1).

I have a collection of New York City Metro newspapers. It was a short-lived newspaper overseen by Rupert Murdoch, launched in August of 1978, when the three major NYC dailies ceased operations due to the Pressman's Union strike. The paper only lasted for 38 editions, and I have copies of the first ten. I know there were other strike newspapers at the time, but I believe the NYCM was the largest in scope. As such, I assume many of the locals ads are rarer than usual, so I'll be concentrating on those.

Although the paper's run began with Monday, August 21st, I picked up the Friday edition first in order to check the movie openings. Before getting to that, a Gimbel's ad caught my eye:

Gadzooks--who the hell stuck around an extra hour for some lousy puppet show? Wouldn'ta been me! I actually did see The Hulk in person once, but I think it was at Toys R Us. The costume was like a plastic shell flocked with green fuzz, swimming around the stock boy who came closest to filling the inflexible thing. I'm reminded of it when I tear the stiff, matted grass clippings from under the riding mower.

Stay tuned for more!