To Pee or Not to Pee

Flopped out a few more Boin Box series bio-quicklies in the a.m.: Yuu Aiuchi (the breathtakingly lovely lass to our left), Mayu Hibiki, and Haruka Koide, with Donizetti's Anna Bolena (Gencer, Simionato) for accompaniment, until, once again, the server's problems curtailed editing... This time leaving a glaring error in an article, which I couldn't correct (giving Yuu Aiuchi's bust measurement as 34cm instead of 34 inches / 85cm). At least this morning's error message was different from the usual "Forbidden". This time I was informed, "This is a cached copy of the requested page, and may not be up to date. Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties." Ah well, I fixed it after a few minutes.

Continuing my exploration of obscure B-movie rarities, I watched something called Wizard of Oz (1939) today. I'm going to go out on a limb and say this film is destined for classic status. I always wondered why the fact that Frank Morgan who played both Professor Marvel and the Wizard, is also the gate-keeper/carriage driver never seems to be noticed by anyone else. Or am I imagining it. No, IMDb lists it. I guess it's known. Anyway, it adds another level to the Wizard's humbuggery...

It strikes me now, too, that since I saw the movie on a Korean DVD, the Korean translation-- 오즈의 마법사 ("Ojeu ui mabopsa") needs only a minor alteration-- 오줌의 마법사 ("Ojum ui mabopsa") to become an excellent title for a scatological porn DVD-- "The Wizard of Piss". Believe it... or not... (Unfortunately, a Wiki-pimp search on the title indicates I'm not the first to come up with this clever little pun...) I'd post a picture here of one of my favorite Japanese lovelies peeing, but I suspect Blogspot / Blogger would have a policy against such things. Checking the Terms of Service, however, I only see the explicit exclusion of bestiality (there goes some Hisayasu Satou films), and incest... do they mean real incest or the portrayal of it by actors? If the former, how do they prove it? If the latter, well, a whole lot of stuff is excluded, including much of the oeuvre of my beloved, maternal Tamaki Yasuoka, not to mention such major filmmakers as Shouhei Imamura. (At right, jolly AV actresses Usagi Minagi and Tamaki Yasuoka demand an answer to this relative question.)... I'm sure I've got a few images of actresses urinating hidden away somewhere, but a quick browse through my archives turned up nothing immediate... It's not my cup of pee anyway, so why fight for it?... Piss on it...

I was back and forth while the movie played, but I had to sit down to enjoy my favorite moment. It's when Dorothy is getting ready to click her heels together and return to Kansas. The Wizard has already taken off in the balloon. She's saying goodbye to her Oz friends, as "If I Only Had a Brain" is playing softly, with restrained passion on the soundtrack. Just when she comes to the Cowardly Lion, the violins suddenly, sweetly soar up to the stratosphere in close harmony, like a stifled sob, longing for home but regretting leaving new friends, anticipating the later wish to return to Oz, the inevitable return to sepia-tones after all the magical color of the last 90 minutes, the audience's knowledge that the film is coming to an end, and of childhood's bittersweet ending leading to disillusioned adulthood, old age and death, Judy Garland's for one... All wrapped up in one wistful little passing phrase in the strings. Chokes me up every time...

I woke up early for a Sunday-- about 5:30 a.m.-- so I had a good three hours of Boobpedian work done before breakfast. I continued with the Boin Box series project. Did some shopping and other real-life crap that cut into my precious BP-editing time, then got to flop out 1-5 more article stubs at a time whenever I could sit down at the computer. The day's work produced 27 DVD stubs, nestling my day's editing comfily between the two lovelies, Madoka Ayukawa from Boin "Madoka Ayukawa" Box (BOBB-079, seen at left) and Yuu Aiuchi from Boin "Yuu Aiuchi" Box 2 (BOBB-106, seen at right).

This evening's excursion into the risky realm of public domain cinematic pleasure consisted of The Wackiest Wagon Train in the West (1976; from 1973 TV footage). I'm not really sure it's public domain though, since it's not available for download at the Internet Archive. Maybe it's just that nobody wants to claim ownership...The film was simply four episodes of the television series Dusty's Trail lazily stitched together. Dusty's Trail was a lazy imitation of Gilligan's Island. What made Gilligan work well for what it was-- crap-- was that its plots moved. It had enough plot in any one episode for any three run-of-the-mill crap TV sitcoms. An incident would set off a plot point, which would lead to another incident setting off more things, and another, and another. Dusty, like most crap sitcoms, had one thing set off the entire episode, and that was it. The setting for the series was simply the Gilligan characters moved to the old west. Forest Tucker as the "Skipper" figure was pretty good. Bob Denver in the Gilligan / Dusty role seemed listless and tired, but not too awfully bad. The rest of the Gilligan characters-- Mr. & Mrs. Howell, the Professor, Ginger & MaryAnne-- were all there, but without the talented actors that made them work well in Gilligan. The stitched-together aspect of the film was pretty obvious. Every 25 minutes one stopped and another started. All-in-all it was pretty damned bad.