Click the images to make them BIGGER.

The Super Hero Time Machine (1977) – Why they didn’t just call these “watches” I have no idea.  Great looking ad, though.  Interesting that it’s all DC characters except for the one Spider-Man watch.

Chuck Norris and Right Guard (1993) – Walker Texas Ranger roundhouse kicks underarm odor into submission, one armpit at a time.

Chuck Norris Action Jeans – “Won’t bind your legs” when you’re high kicking the sh*t out of some punk’s face. (Via Branded in the 80s)

Right Guard Lime Deodorant (’70s) – This is weird.  Lime deodorant?  I didn’t know it, but there still exists a Gillette Lemon-Lime Shaving Cream.  What’s next?  Is Kool-Aid releasing a deodorant flavored drink?

Rumple Mintze Peppermint Schnapps (1993) – This is the greatest liquor ad I have ever seen. EVER.  Giant Battle Polar Bear, half naked warrior chick with an eye patch and a sword as big as she is, a frozen wasteland of snow and a huge bottle of ice-cold liquor.  Rumple Mintze has just won advertising.

Macho cologne by Faberge (1976) – It’s a men’s cologne named Macho and it’s shaped like a penis. I’m assuming, in Russian, Faberge does not mean “subtle”.

Lee clothing ad (1976) – Check out Willy Wonka here. That suit is awesome. He looks like the mayor of Munchkin City.  Those pants look like a picnic table.  Or a couch my grandmother had.  And how ’70s is that yellow background?  My parents’ kitchen had counter tops and appliances in that color.  Why, ’70s?!  Why?!

Champale (1975) – The chick on the right looks scared.  And she should be.  Mustache dude looks like he’s trying to get her drunk on Champale (was Boone’s Farm too expensive?).  Then, instead of “Get set for living” it’ll be “Get set for raping”.  Am I right?

Microsoft released Windows 95 on Aug 24, 1995, 15 years ago today.  It was developed internally as Windows 4 or under the codename Chicago.  The whole operating system was designed to be a “ground up” improvement of Windows 3.1 including vast enhancements to the GUI, or “user interface”. It was with this release of Windows that Microsoft became the computing powerhouse it became in the late 90s/early 2000s. It was also this success with Windows 95 and early versions of Internet Explorer that would lay the ground work for all of Microsoft’s problems with the Justice Department about being a monopoly.

Like I said, Windows 95 was the birth of Windows as we now know it today.  The taskbar and Start button began here as well as “plug and play” compatibility, 32 bit processing and the Windows Explorer file management application.  All of these innovations were included and remain in current versions of Windows mostly unchanged to this day.  Internet Explorer 1.0 was available for the release of Windows 95, but not with the default installation, which didn’t even install TCP/IP.  You had to buy the Microsoft Plus! pack to get the brand new Microsoft browser as well as other features like themes and disc compression.  Microsoft Plus! was mostly used in factory installs, so not many people used IE at first.  Internet Explorer would become part of the Win95 installation with IE v2.0 several months later.

Above is a picture of the basic Win95 desktop. Like I said, this still looks like many computer desktops today.  You can see many basic Windows programs like Wordpad, Calculater, MS Paint and Windows Explorer that even today exist on current versions of Windows.

Windows 95 was launched with Apple-like fanfare including people waiting in lines to buy a copy at midnight and a full on television ad campaign including a commercial featuring the Rolling Stones song Start Me Up.

To help users with the brand new interface, Microsoft created a 30 minute promotional video starring Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry.

All of Microsoft’s ancillary programs were updated with the new 32 bit architecture and user interface enhancements and bundled into Microsoft Office 95, also released on Aug 24, 1995.

The standard lineup of MS Office 95 was Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Schedule.  Microsoft Schedule was the precursor to Microsoft Outlook (which was released in 1997).  The Professional version of MS Office also included MS Access.  If you bought MS Office 95 Professional on CD-ROM (as opposed to like 10 3″ discs) you were also given MS Bookshelf which was Microsoft’s version of a digital encyclopedia (it was a cheaper version of Microsoft Encarta).

It was this release of Microsoft Windows that pretty much cemented Microsoft as the operating system for the masses. So regardless of what you personally think of Microsoft, there’s no denying that it is an essential part of our computing history.

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So, Billy the Kid Week was last week and I finished it up with a review of the movie Billy the Kid vs Dracula.  This was a movie that looked and sounded terrible, but had a concept that was so completely out of left field (and AWESOME) that I fell head over heels for it.  Unfortunately, the movie lived up to how bad it looked and I gave up an hour into the complete mess of a movie.  However the concept stuck with me and I decided I wanted someone to remake this movie today (or, better yet, in the 80s/90s).  How incredible would that have been?  Something like Young Guns but with a little Lost Boys mixed in?  FANTASTIC.

So, I started to cast my remake of this movie.  I decided I wanted Emilio Estevez as Billy (obviously).  Late 80s or early 90s Estevez would be ideal.  However, if we made it today, I like the idea of an older Billy clashing with the King of the Vampires, too.  Now, for Drac, I really want to say Bela Lugosi, however, Bela died WELL before the ’80s/’90s so I needed someone else that could make a good vampire lord.  After much thought I came up with Sam Neill.  He was a fantastic vampire in Daybreakers and I think he would make a great Dracula. Plus, if we made this movie in the late 80s early ’90s, Neill doesn’t look much different now than he did back then (see him in Hunt for Red October in 1990 or Jurassic Park in 1993).  So, here’s our two protagonists.

I am so in love with this movie right now.  I literally would take this movie, move to Connecticut and marry it in a commitment ceremony, then make sweet, sweet love with it on a bear skin rug next to a raging fire until the sun comes up.  That’s right, bear skin rug by the fire love making.  You know I’m seriously in love.  Anyway, I also wanted a female caught between these two guys.  I thought about Angelina Jolie, but she may be too tough and doesn’t really fit into this.  I wanted more of a sweet female character.  My first choice would probably be Gwyneth Paltrow.   The first thing I remember seeing her in was Se7en in 1995.  I loved her in that and I love her now.  That’s my first choice, so I’m going with that.  Besides, 1995 seems like a good year to make this movie now that I think about it.  Gwyneth would be 23 and fresh off Se7en.  Emilio would be a few years past the Young Guns movies and he didn’t appear in any movies in 1995 but appeared in D2: The Mighty Ducks in 1994 and a small role in Mission: Impossible in 1996.  Sam Neill would be two years after his role in Jurassic Park. So 1995 seems like a nice fit for this movie.  Now the poster.

I tried to come up with a poster for this fictional movie but nothing I did really seemed to work. I used the above pictures as well as some other images and nothing really gelled the way I wanted it to.  Then I got thinking outside the box and decided to go all vintage for the poster.  It would make things look less Photoshop-y (but maybe that’s just me overestimating my Photoshop abilities).  I took one of my favorite Bela Lugosi Dracula posters from the ’30s and modified it for my own purposes.  So here’s the poster for my new Billy the Kid vs Dracula remake.

You’ll notice I put James Mangold as the director. I went more modern with that choice as he directed the 3:10 to Yuma remake a few years ago which I loved. As for his work in the 90s, he wrote/directed both Cop Land (1997) and Girl, Interrupted (1999) as well as writing the screenplay for Walk the Line in 2005.  That tells me he can also write my new remake as well as direct it.  However, I also toyed with the idea of having John Fusco write this movie as he wrote both Young Guns movies as well as The Forbidden Kingdom (2008) starring Jackie Chan and Jet Li as well as the underrated Crossroads (1986) starring Ralph Macchio.  Mangold directed Heavy in 1995 with Liv Tyler but I’m willing to bet he would have jumped at the chance to direct this fascinating genre picture.  I mean, who wouldn’t?

I have a couple of ideas for story, but obviously if I landed Mangold and/or Fusco I would totally defer to their ideas.  The question is, does the movie take place in the Old West or does Billy get sent through time?  It may be easier to have Dracula traveling through a late 1800s America for whatever reason and meeting up with Billy in New Mexico, but I like the idea of having Billy sent through time to the future to face off with Dracula.  Billy the Kid vs Dracula is inherently ridiculous so adding the element of time travel could work, but might make it even more ridiculous…but in a bad way.

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This is Day 5 of Billy the Kid Week. All week I’ve been reviewing movies featuring the character of Billy the Kid. Here are the previous week’s entries:

Day 0: Young Guns II 20th birthday
Day 1: Howard Hughes’ The Outlaw
Day 2: The Left Handed Gun starring Paul Newman
Day 3: Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
Day 4: Young Guns 22nd birthday

Since today is Friday the 13th, I am dubbing today as Billy the Kid Week’s “Freaky Friday”.  I will review one wacky and one scary movie featuring Billy. The first movie will be the Three Stooges’ epic western, The Outlaws IS Coming. The second movie will be the horror schlockfest Billy the Kid vs Dracula. These movies look like they should be appropriately zany, so let’s get started.

Released in 1965, this is the last fully completed film featuring The Stooges. They began filming one more movie, Kook’s Tour, in 1970, but Larry had a stroke before filming was completed and the movie sat unfinished and unreleased for years afterward.

The original title of this movie was The Three Stooges Meet The Gunslingers.  That earlier title sounds reminiscent of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein for a reason as this movie is setup in much the same way. Instead of being a “monster rally” movie featuring a famous comedy team, it’s a “gunslinger rally” movie featuring a famous comedy team. There are 9 famous gunslingers in this movie including Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Wild Bill Hickock, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Johnny Ringo, Cole Younger, Rob Dalton and Belle Star.  Each of the nine gunslingers were played by popular local Kid-TV hosts of the day.  Other notable stars in this film are Adam West as Kenneth Cabot,  a naive ne’er-do-well who works with the Stooges, the gorgeous Nancy Kovack as Annie Oakley and Henry Gibson as Charlie Horse, the Indian chief’s son.  The movie is even narrated by Paul Frees, known for his voice work on Rocky and Bullwinkle (most notably, Boris Badenov).  So, lots of talent were culled together to make this last movie for the Stooges.  West would go on to Batman the very next year.  Nancy Kovack would go on to several roles in geek classics like Queenie in two episodes of West’s Batman as well as Nona in an episode of the original Star Trek in 1968.

In the movie, the Stooges work as photographers and “undercover investigators” at an organization similar to the ASPCA.  They work with West’s Cabot and are sent on an undercover mission to Casper, Wyoming to determine why the population of Bison are dwindling.  They discover that a ruthless cattle baron, Rance Roden, has a group of deadly gunslingers killing off the bison to stir up the Indian population into an uprising that will slaughter the cavalry and put Roden in charge of the government (how the cavalry being defeated puts Rance as ruler of the government is not explained).  Oh, and Roden is selling government weapons to the Indians.  We meet the group of gunslingers in the beginning and learn where their territories are.  For some reason, Billy the Kid is said to be in charge of the Dakota Territory instead of Santa Fe (New Mexico, where Billy spent the majority of his life).  Johnny Ringo is in charge of Santa Fe.  Not a big deal since this is a Stooges movie, but it surprised me.  Anyway, we meet the gunslingers in the beginning, then we really don’t see them again until the end when there’s a big gunfight.  So, Billy the Kid only has dialogue in like two scenes.  Also, he’s played with the temperament of a teenager or child.  He whines and cries whenever he doesn’t want to do something.  Roden’s henchman Trigger Mortis (Get it? It’s a play on Rigor Mortis…haha!) gets most of the screen time for the villains.

West was pretty good, he was appropriately dull as the naive Cabot.  The Stooges were funny and bumbling.  Some of the gags were groan inducing, but this was at the end of the Stooges long run of movies and shorts so I didn’t expect them to be in top form.  However, they were still pretty good considering.  What really surprised me was how much I loved Nancy Kovack.  Oh my lord, she was gorgeous.  And she wore these ruffle-y hoop skirt Western dresses but always with gun holsters around her hips.  It was awesome.  I fell in love.  I’m going to seek out her Batman and Star Trek appearances now to see more.  She also played Madea in Jason and the Argonauts which I’ve never seen, so I’ll be seeking that out also.

So, yes, I can recommend this movie.  Billy the Kid makes a small appearance, but this movie is really a showcase for the Stooges.  It’s fun, not as good as some of the Stooges’ best movies or shorts, but still an enjoyable watch, even if only to see a young Adam West, a gorgeous Nancy Kovack and a really young Henry Gibson (who would go on to greater fame as an ensemble player on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In).

Billy the Kid vs Dracula was released in 1966 as part of a double bill with Jesse James vs Frankenstein’s Daughter.  I thought this movie sounded gloriously insane.  So bad that it would swing back over into the good category.  I was wrong.  This movie is terrible.  First of all, it looks like it was filmed on someone’s Super-8 handheld.  Second, John Carradine as Dracula looked like someone’s creepy uncle that dressed like a children’s party magician.  TERRIBLE.  And Billy?  Not really a gunslinger in this movie (as he’s reformed, see), but the foreman of a ranch and engaged to the ranch owner’s daughter.

Dracula meets the ranch owner on a stagecoach on her way, with her brother, back to the ranch. She shows Dracula (calling himself Underhill) a picture of her daughter and he falls in love with her immediately (and eye f**ks the sh*t out of that picture, I might add. See above on the left for an example of said eye f**king).  Dracula kills everyone in the stagecoach and assumes the identity of the ranch owner’s brother.  I’m not sure Dracula really thought ahead on this plan because if he’s supposed to woo the daughter to be one of Dracula’s brides, you’d think he would pick another identity besides her UNCLE.  Am I right?  Whatever.

Anyway, Billy finds out the guy is a vampire, some weird family from Transylvania that happens to be in America and have had dealings with Dracula, show up and help Billy.  No one, including the daughter (of course) believes that Underhill is Dracula (much less a vampire) so they decide to defeat Dracula on their own.  And that’s when I tapped out.  Seriously.  I stopped the DVD and got on with my life.  It wasn’t worth it to actually finish this movie.  It was dumb.  The film transfer looked like a sweaty Sasquatch wiped its ass with it and the story and acting were terrible.  I just couldn’t subject myself to anymore of that nonsense.

So needless to say, Billy the Kid vs Dracula gets a do not watch under any circumstances from me.  It’s a shame, because this could have been campy and fun.  A remake of this today with Emilio as Billy and someone like Sam Neill as Dracula would kick all kinds of ass.  It could be sooooooo good.  Oh well.

Well, that’s Billy the Kid Week for this year.  Hope you guys enjoyed it as much as I did bringing it to you.  I’ll be resurrecting it next July when we reach the 130th anniversary of Billy the Kid’s death.

Have a great weekend everyone.

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Welcome to Day 4 of Billy the Kid Week. I’ve been reviewing Billy the Kid movies every day. Here are the previous days’ reviews:

Day 0: Young Guns II 20th birthday
Day 1: Howard Hughes’ The Outlaw
Day 2: The Left Handed Gun starring Paul Newman
Day 3: Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

Which now brings us to today’s movie review, Young Guns, which also celebrates its 22nd birthday today.

Young Guns was released on Aug 12, 1988.  I was fourteen years old.  I didn’t see it on the day of release, I saw it later that year.  I didn’t know that much about the movie going into it, only that it was a western starring Emilio Estevez.  I decided to see it on a lark towards the end of the movie’s run.

When I was done watching it, I was blown away.  I had no expectations going in so this movie blew me out of the back of the theater.  I loved it.  I was especially in love with Emilio’s portrayal of Billy the Kid.  He played the living sh*t out of that character.  Also, the movie was full of action and snappy dialogue.  I loved the movie so much I started reading everything I could get my hands on about Billy the Kid.  I checked out library books about real life gunslingers and started reading western fiction including titles like The First Fast Draw by Louis L’Amour and other Billy the Kid titles like Anything for Billy by Larry McMurtry.  It really shaped some of my interests during high school.  I was even Emilio Estevez’s version of Billy the Kid for Halloween one year.

So, for the 22nd anniversary I sat down with my wife and watched this movie for the first time in probably 9-10 years. It was the first time ever for my wife to watch it.  When I watched this movie last I remember thinking that I had started liking Young Guns II better, I thought it was more fun.  I remember thinking that Young Guns was a little more boring than I remembered.  Well, I’m here to say that my 10 years ago self was full of crap.  This movie is anything BUT boring.  I still love it.

Everyone in this movie plays a great part.  Obviously, Estevez shines as Billy but Sheen and Sutherland also have great characters.  I was also surprised at the sheer number of famous faces in this movie.  I’d forgotten half of them.  Terence Stamp played John Tunstall.  Jack Palance was Murphy.  Terry O’Quinn (Lost’s John Locke) was Alex McSween.  Hell, even John Wayne’s son Patrick played the part of Pat Garrett.  This is a star studded affair.  But it wasn’t just the talent, it was the story.

Considering how much I’ve read up on Billy, I was also surprised to see how much the writer, John Fusco, took from the actual life of Billy and incorporated it into the fictional movie’s story.  Pretty much everything in the movie happened, however the events may have been out of order or dramatized for the sake of the movie.  Nearly every one of these characters were involved in the real Billy’s life at some point.  There are even two or three characters left out of the movie, but Fusco would include these missing characters in the sequel two years later. Also, several characters die in this movie that didn’t die at the same time in Billy’s real life. The character of Charlie Bowdre dies during the escape from the McSween house in this movie but in real life Bowdre wouldn’t die until the assault on Stinking Springs which is depicted in the second movie, when Doc Scurlock dies. No doubt this happened because Fusco didn’t expect to write a sequel to this first movie as it very clearly has an ending.

This movie is just great.  It’s a fantastic fictional representation of Billy the Kid’s life with just enough real life history to make it interesting and just the right amount of action/dramatization to make it fun.  Emilio plays an incredibly likeable, yet also frustratingly single-minded and stubborn, Billy and the end of this movie makes me want to immediately watch Young Guns II to revisit these fun characters.

I’m glad I can highly recommend this movie 22 years after it first premiered.  I can’t say that about very many other movies.

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