{"id":1103,"date":"2008-02-03T10:48:14","date_gmt":"2008-02-03T14:48:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/03\/flat-out-of-sight-totally-together\/"},"modified":"2008-03-31T23:34:17","modified_gmt":"2008-04-01T03:34:17","slug":"flat-out-of-sight-totally-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/03\/flat-out-of-sight-totally-together\/","title":{"rendered":"Flat out of sight, totally together…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

A while back I discovered that my wife somehow managed to grow up without seeing any of the Kurt Russell<\/a> Disney mad-science-at-college movies from the late Sixties and early Seventies.<\/p>\n

So, I added the movies to my Zip<\/a> queue, and while I was in Australia the first one, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes<\/a>, arrived.<\/p>\n

So we watched it earlier this week. I haven’t seen it since I was quite young, probably late in the single-digit years, and it’s quite a different movie when viewed as an adult in the early 21st century.<\/p>\n

There’s some “my how technology has changed” laughs, as when the computer is delivered–in a series of floor-to-ceiling cabinets that essentially fill a room. There’s some “you couldn’t get away with that now” comedy, as when the doctors look into Dexter<\/a>‘s eyes and can see a cabinet with flashing lights inside there–obviously visual shorthand for the “there’s a computer in his head” thing, but there’s something charmingly naive about the way it’s presented. There’s the “look, it’s clean cut, eighteen year old Snake Plissken<\/a>” comedy, the “gangsters in a hippy dunebuggy racing comedy”, and so much more.<\/p>\n

There’s also an object lesson in the way stories are told. The total screen time consumed between the computer-brain accident and the time that everyone knows what’s going on is about 180 seconds. The time between then and our hero being a world famous celebrity is less than that. Those old Disney flicks didn’t fool around with pacing.<\/p>\n

However, FAR AND AWAY the best thing about the movie–which was a complete and total surprise to me, since it apparently made no impression the first time (or more likely wasn’t even there the first time, since I probably saw the cut-down version that they would have shown on the weekly Disney TV show) is the theme song. It’s so gloriously, hilariously, BadGood that I had to rip it off the movie’s soundtrack and make myself an MP3 to preserve it. Actually the visuals that accompany it are similarly amazing, but I wasn’t going to Youtube it, because I’m basically lazy. It appears to be the work of obviously underappreciated Disney genius Robert F. Brunner<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And now I will share it with you.<\/p>\n

<\/center><\/p>\n

At some future point we’ll watch the other two movies in the sequence: Now You See Him Now You Don’t<\/a> and The Strongest Man in the World<\/a>, but I suspect that there won’t be anything in them to compare with the awesomeness of that track.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A while back I discovered that my wife somehow managed to grow up without seeing any of the Kurt Russell Disney mad-science-at-college movies from the late Sixties and early Seventies. So, I added the movies to my Zip queue, and while I was in Australia the first one, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, arrived. So we watched it earlier this… Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9],"tags":[83,84,27,144,459,126],"class_list":["post-1103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","tag-benevolent-surrealism","tag-embed","tag-movies","tag-mp3","tag-music","tag-something-great","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-hN","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1103\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}