Above is the opening to the 1957 comedy Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? In it, Tony Randall and his one-man band render Alfred Newman’s famous theme music for 20th Century-Fox — a movie studio that sadly, as of this writing, has only a few more hours of existence left in Hollywood. It is the victim of another monumental buyout by The Mouse House, a/k/a The Walt Disney Co.
Contemporary film buffs of a certain age (those at puberty and just beyond, I’d say) probably can’t imagine why anyone would get misty-eyed over the death of a movie studio. But for film buffs like me, there was a certain majesty to the old movie intros with their sophisticated logos — Paramount with its frosty mountain, Universal with its outer-space view of the Earth, and Fox with its flashy searchlights. If nothing else, it meant that the given movie studio was doing its best to give you some bang for their buck.
It seemed like a gentler era, too, before conglomerates were sweeping up everything in their paths. Back in his glory days of Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks told an interviewer that he was proud to work at Fox because it wasn’t a company, it was a movie studio. Of course, that interview was conducted in 1978, long before News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch decided to make Fox one more weapon in his monetary war chest.
(Do you ever get the feeling that all the buyer-uppers are buying up the lesser buyer-uppers? I fear that someday, every company under the sun will be owned by a supergroup named “America, Inc.”)
In any case, for no good reason, I’ve decided to catalog the titles of all of the 20th Century-Fox films that have meant a great deal to me over the years. Not all of them are acknowledged classics, but they’ve all wormed their way into my movie memories for some good reason. I have reviewed many of these movies on my previous blog, and when I have, I have included links to those reviews. (If you have any Fox favorites that I’ve missed, feel free to list them in the “Comments” section below.)
So, would you like to know how technologically inept I am?
One weekend in Feb. 2019, my computer had an Internet connection, but I couldn’t get anything to come up on my computer screen. As is the way of all non-savvy computer nerds, I quickly deduced that the best way to get everything going again on my screen was to purge everything I could think of. By mistake, that included the user ID and password of my WordPress account.
When I tried to get back into my WordPress account, WordPress asked me for my user ID and password. I had forgotten my password long ago (I only use a few thousand of them), and the user ID was an email account that I had deleted long ago after it got hacked. WordPress informed me that, unless I could send them an email message from my user ID’s account, they would not be able to send me a new password, and therefore, I would be locked out of my own account.
And so it went. My access to four-and-a-half years of blogging and several hundred blog subscribers were suddenly locked behind bars. (I imagined hearing a loud “cha-ching!” from the TV series “Law & Order.”)
So I’ve decided to try and make lemonade out of my WordPress lemons. I am resuming my blogging career on this “sequel” blog.
Of course, I still have a “history” of previous blogging that I’d like to reference on occasion. So be forewarned that now, I will often hyperlink to my previous blog. For example, if I’m writing about Charlie Chaplin, and I want to reference a Chaplin movie review from my old blog, I will link to it like this. So please note that, obviously, if you go to that hyperlink, you will have to press the “Back” button on your computer keyboard in order to return to this “sequel” blog.
If, by chance, you know anyone who followed my previous blog but is not aware of my current situation, please let them know so that I can restore some of my old readership. And of course, please feel free to return to and reference my previous blog, whose URL is listed on the masthead of this blog.
Thank you for bearing with me through a quite troublesome situation.
View all posts by moviemovieblogblogii
MovieMovieBlogBlog II 