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50 Seasons of Super Sentai Come to an End
With the recent announcement of the end of the last season of Super Sentai in Japan (pasted at the end of this piece), an era has closed. 50…
Satoshi Kon Interview 2003: MILLENNIUM ACTRESS and TOKYO GODFATHERS
In 2003, on assignment from Animerica Magazine, I interviewed Satoshi Kon, a renowned director of Japanese animated films, at the Big Apple Anime Fest in New York. He…
25 Favorite Films from the First Quarter of the 21st Century
As the first quarter of the 21st century has ended, it seemed like a good idea to see how many favorite films from the years 2001 to 2025…
Unsung Walter Lantz Cartoon: “Scrambled Eggs” (1939)
“Scrambled Eggs” (1939), produced by Walter Lantz for release by Universal Pictures, is a nine-minute Technicolor cartoon about a mischievous supernatural forest character named Peterkin who is drawn…
Richard Burton Centennial
Richard Burton was born in Wales on November 10, 1925, which means his centennial was eleven days ago. Better late than never since I was a huge fan…
Classic Adventures: Animated Literary Tales
I have a box set of “Classic Adventures,” consisting of ten 48-minute animated adaptations of classic literary adventures, nine based on novels and one based on a true-life…
Old Cartoons: Adventures in Surrealism (Revised)
“200 Classic Cartoons” is a box set of four discs worth of old cartoons, which cost me $4.99 at Barnes & Noble back in 2014. (The distributor is…
Anime Background Art: Painted vs. Digital
This piece is meant to celebrate the unsung artists who create the background art for the animated characters in Japanese anime. Up until the late 1990s, all background…
Animated Classics of Japanese Literature, Toward the Terra, Toward the Terra
Gore Vidal Centennial
To commemorate the centennial of author Gore Vidal (born October 3, 1925), I am reposting a blog entry I did on the occasion of his death in 2012,…
Big Apple Anime Fest 2003 World Anime Party
This piece contains material I wrote right after attending the Big Apple Anime Fest in New York on August 28-31, 2003. I actually wrote three separate drafts at…
Toei Anime Classics: The Littlest Warrior (1961)
Released in Japan in 1961, THE LITTLEST WARRIOR is a full-length animated feature from Toei Animation, made after the studio’s earlier, better-known features, PANDA AND THE MAGIC SERPENT…
Science Fiction Theatre: 70th Anniversary of the First Color Sci-Fi TV Show
“Science Fiction Theatre” premiered on television on April 9, 1955, 70 years ago today (using the date IMDB gives for the airing of the first episode). It told…
Deanna Durbin and the Battleship Yamato
What is the connection between Hollywood musical star Deanna Durbin and the Japanese World War II battleship Yamato? I’ve written before about Deanna Durbin’s popularity in Japan, where…
Legendary Star Team-Ups: Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960), a western about gunslingers hired to protect a Mexican village, and THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963), a fact-based account of a mass breakout from a…
Elvis at 90
Elvis Presley was born on January 8, 1935, 90 years ago today, so I decided to commemorate the occasion by sharing scans of pages from a pair of…
Ten Viewing Highlights of 2024: From Shogun to Morricone
I went to theaters to see movies only six times in 2024. Most of what I watched was at home, either on Blu-ray, DVD, VHS, VCD, YouTube or…
Science Fiction Art in Anime
After the paperback and magazine covers, comic books, bubblegum cards and sci-fi films and TV shows I was exposed to in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, all of…
Science Fiction Art on Page and Screen from Jules Verne to Jack Kirby
I read H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) recently and began reading Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870) and I got to wondering when the genre…
70 Years of Godzilla
70 years ago, on November 3, 1954, GOJIRA opened in theaters across Japan. Directed by Ishiro Honda, it told a stark tale of a prehistoric dinosaur presumably awakened…
Horror Films Seen in Theaters 1960-1980
A look back through my prime formative moviegoing years in the 1960s and ’70s reveals a wide range of different horror films seen in theaters then and I…
Double Feature Memories, Part 2: The 1970s
In an earlier post this year, I recounted some of the great double bills I got to see in the 1960s in New York theaters. For Part 2,…
NINJA (2009) – New York, Bulgarian Style
I initially was drawn to NINJA (2009), a straight-to-video martial arts vehicle for Scott Adkins, back in 2011 because it was directed by Isaac Florentine, of “Mighty Morphin…
In Memoriam: Cheng Pei Pei
Cheng Pei Pei, one of my favorite actresses from Hong Kong cinema, passed away at the age of 78 last month on July 17, 2024. She’s probably best…
James Baldwin Centennial
August 2, 2024 marks the centennial of author James Baldwin, who was born on this date in 1924 and died December 1, 1987. To commemorate the occasion, I…
Fandom in the ’90s: Anime, Hong Kong, Godzilla and Power Rangers
The 1990s was an exciting period to enter fan cultures, especially in New York. I plunged heavily into anime in 1992, thanks to a chance encounter at a…
Audie Murphy Centennial
June 20, 2024 marks the centennial of Audie Murphy, a young man from Texas who joined the army in 1942 and fought Nazis in World War II. He…
MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO and its Critical Reception in New York in 1993
In 1992 I acquired a VHS tape of Hayao Miyazaki’s MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO (1988), copied from an unsubtitled Japanese laserdisc. It was only the second example of Japanese…
Roger Corman: A Memorial Tribute
Film legend Roger Corman passed away on May 9th at the age of 98 after a directing/producing/distributing career that had lasted some 70 years. He’s famous for a…
Anime and Japanese Architecture – Old and New
One of the visual thrills I get from watching Japanese films is noting the intricate design of Japanese buildings found in period settings, from the details of the…
MGM Centennial: Post-Golden Age, 1960-1973
As film buffs everywhere, led by TCM, celebrate the 100th anniversary of the merger that formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on April 17, 1924, and rehash the litany of great films…
Double Feature Memories, Part 1: The 1960s
Turner Classic Movies has an eight-minute interstitial called “Two for One: The Tradition of the Double Feature,” and features Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg recalling the great double…
Japan and the Foreign Language Film Oscar
Japan’s choice of Wim Wenders’ PERFECT DAYS (2023) as its submission for Best International Feature at this year’s Academy Awards and its subsequent nomination got me to thinking…
Lee Marvin Centennial
“Lee was my kind of actor, a real tough-looking, tough-talking sonofabitch.” – Sam Fuller Lee Marvin was born in New York City on Feb. 19, 1924. Today marks…
Chow Yun-Fat in New York, 1996
On April 26, 1996, I visited a screening room in Manhattan to see PEACE HOTEL (1995), the last film Chow Yun-Fat made in Hong Kong in the 20th…
The Films of 1973, Part 2: A Great Year for Movies
Since I covered so many cops, crime, Blaxploitation and kung fu films in Part 1, I decided to post a second entry for everything else from 1973: westerns,…
The Films of 1973, Part 1: Cops, Crime and Kung Fu
1973 offered a wealth of riches for regular moviegoers, particularly those at neighborhood theaters. Hollywood released a ton of exemplary crime films, alternating hard-nosed cops with career crimi…
SPIRIT: STALLION OF THE CIMARRON: An Animated Western Classic
One day late last year, I got to thinking about my favorite American animated movie of the 21st century, SPIRIT: STALLION OF THE CIMARRON, and realized I hadn’t…
Hayao Miyazaki in New York: 1999 Interview
It’s currently Hayao Miyazaki season in the U.S. as the latest film of the Japanese animation pioneer, THE BOY AND THE HERON, opens wide and becomes a bonafide…
Black-and-White in 1960s Hollywood
Black-and-white films were regularly produced and released by the major Hollywood studios right up through 1966, which happened to be the last year that the Academy Award categories…
SHANGHAI EXPRESS 1932 to 2007: Five Degrees of Separation
SHANGHAI EXPRESS is the title of two great films made 54 years apart, 1932 and 1986, in two different countries thousands of miles apart, the U.S. and Hong…
Movies from Childhood: A Collection of Images
Inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s 8-part series, “Histoire(s) du Cinema,” I decided to look over images I’ve compiled from films I saw in childhood and find ways to juxtapose…
Pokémon in America: 25 Years and Counting
25 years ago this month, on September 8, 1998, my favorite Japanese animated TV franchise premiered in its English-dubbed version on American television. My long relationship with Pokémon…
THE BLOB (1958): Criterion Blu-ray of a Sci-Fi Classic
When I was five, I remember standing outside my local movie theater, the Crotona, and seeing a poster for the movie, THE BLOB (1958), with this massive jello-like…
60 Years Ago at the Movies: JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963)
In the summer of 1963, on my tenth birthday, I was taken by my parents to see my first Broadway show, “She Loves Me,” and afterwards we walked…
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: 30th Anniversary Tribute
While the Power Rangers franchise is still going strong after 30 years, I thought I’d look back at the early seasons of “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers,” which premiered…
“Aim for the Ace!” – Classic Anime Tennis Series
“Aim for the Ace!” (Ace wo Nerae) is a 26-episode Japanese animated TV series made in 1973 about high school women’s tennis. The focus is on Hiromi Oka,…
Paintings in Movies: PILLOW TALK (1959) and PROJECT A (1983)
I’m always intrigued when I notice background details involving artwork in various films and TV shows, especially paintings on the walls of the various interiors used in the…
50 Years Ago: Bruce Lee
50 years ago today, on July 20, 1973, Bruce Lee died in Hong Kong. Matthew Polly’s informative biography, Bruce Lee: A Life (2018/Simon & Schuster), offers a detailed…
CAPE FEAR: From Martin and Lewis to Martin Scorsese
For the record, CAPE FEAR (1962) is a black-and-white thriller directed by J. Lee Thompson and based on a novel by John D. MacDonald. It stars Robert Mitchum…
Jonas Mekas on the Joys of Hollywood Cinema 1960-65
Jonas Mekas began writing a regular column, entitled Movie Journal, in the Village Voice of November 12, 1958. A filmmaker himself and co-founder of Anthology Film Archives in…