And hellooooooo, everybody! Time to go back down again to the VIDEO STREET VIDEO STORE. I’m a day late this week, but ya know what, the way my schedule’s working out lately, Wednesday may be a pretty good home for this show.
A new podcast drops every Saturday night!
Here’s what’s up this week…
VIDEO 1 📼 SATAN IN MY VHS SOUP
I’ve been wanting to include a Satanic Panic video on the VSVS for a while now, but just never could seem to find the perfect tape to sum up all the essential elements of that very strange time in American culture. Until now.
“Satanic Cults and Ritual Crime” has everything you want in one of these tapes made for paranoid, suburban helicopter parents — or, what we just call today, “parents”:
✔️ A blame game of alleged “satanic” influences such as Dungeons & Dragons and heavy metal pushers like AC/DC and Slayer.
✔️ Homosexuality as a tell-tale sign your kid is a satanist, and that he’s lumped in with other practitioners of sinister perversions like beastliest and necrophiliacs.
✔️ Completely false and arbitrary statistics.
This last checkmark is my favorite, as some of these numbers the video’s producers manage to pull out of their watertight plugholes are truly laughable. I mean, “There may be as many as 60,000 human sacrifices per year in this country.” Really. I guess it’s nice that they at least used the “may” modal…in the same way I might say, “There may be as many as 60,000 dogs with two ding-dongs walking among us at any given time.”
By the way, Professor Al Carlyle of the Utah State Prison System and, later, Brigham Young University, who supplied this statistic and also told them that “Most lawbreakers engage in the occult” (he didn’t even bother with a stat there), died in 2018 after a long career studying serial killers like Ted Bundy. I typed into Google “professor al carlyle + utah + bullshit” and nothing came up, so it seems like he and his reputation escaped the Satanic Panic unscathed, just as many so-called experts always do whenever neo-McCarthyism rears its ugly head in our culture.
VIDEO 2 📼 THE MILLION DOLLAR VOICE OF DON LaFONTAINE
Maybe it’s just me, but with each passing year, as mass media continues to devolve into a fractured jig-saw puzzle of micro-niche, it becomes more difficult to remember a time when only a few voice-over artists commanded our attention during television commercials. Even though many of us were out of the room between segments of Friends, Seinfeld, or whatever else, we could still hear these voices thunder through our living rooms and bounce around all corners of the house. Sure, they were annoying at times, but in a lot of ways, they also defined an era. I think back now and remember how these unseen actors were our gateway to the newest movies and TV shows. Before the Internet, and even later, when Internet advertising still came in a distant third behind television, radio, and movie trailers, they were the first people to tell us about something we oughta watch.
The bulk of this Fox 11 spot from 2004 focuses on Don LaFontaine, who had risen to the top of the VO game with his ubiquitous and much-parodied “In a World” pitch. Ironically, the segment could actually be called an early eulogy to LaFontaine and the Movie Trailer VO industry. When LaFontaine died a few years later, in 2008, the job kind of went with him. A major reason for this is that LaFontaine kind of had a monopoly on the dramatic voice-over, and when he died, advertising was changing en masse. This is not to say, that we don’t still hear Voice-Over all over the place; we just hear less artists who have dedicated their lives to the craft. When we watch commercials now, for instance, we’re likely to hear celebrities with unmistakable voices, like Brian Cox as the current spokesman for McDonalds.
VIDEO 3 📼 SAM PECKINPAH AT THE WORLD SERIES OF POKER
After recently revisiting the 1971 fortress-defense classic Straw Dogs starring Dustin Hoffman and Susan George, I’ve been looking up some old interviews with its director, Sam Peckinpah. Peckinpah, who made Dogs on the heels of his ultraviolent western The Wild Bunch (1969), became (and still remains) one of cinema’s most controversial directors with his depiction of unflinching violence. With such overt statements on violence and its inextricable connection to sex that these two films made, as well as his subsequent post-Hayes code bloodbaths like Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1975), Peckinpah was understandably restrained and stoic during the few interviews he gave. …Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to find this long, uncut sit-down with the director and a local TV host in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The host, Dennis Hunt, comes across as an avid and curious fan of Peckinpah’s. Though Peckinpah appears reluctant to answer questions at first, Hunt smartly resists the temptation to fill much of the dead air that comes after he asks his questions, practically forcing his subject to expand on his initial stock answers. When Hunt queries him about Straw Dogs, for instance, and how he was able to create such an entertainment that gave the audience their money’s worth, Peckinpah goes from simply praising his producer to suddenly laying out his opinion of the “auteur theory,” which he calls nonsense, and that, to make a great picture, “I beg, borrow, and steal any kind of talent I can get.” Peckinpah also becomes quite uncensored about the cheap “former used car dealers” who had recently produced his last film The Osterman Weekend (1983), and how he is considering litigation against them for mangling the final cut of what would come to be regarded as his last, worst, and most forgotten film.
This interview is probably Peckinpah’s last meeting with the press. A short while later, in December 1984, Peckinpah succumbed to the downward spiral into alcoholism and substance addiction that had consumed him in the last decade-or-so of his life. It’s also sad that Peckinpah is plugging in this interview the production of a film that would never be made, with or without him. Taping at the World Series of Poker at the Horseshoe Casino, Peckinpah appears here with Nick Behnan, son-in-law to the casino’s owner Benny Binion, to discuss a movie about Binion’s life, one that was fraught with greed, violence, and intrigue as he went from being a mob associate in Texas to suspected murderer to one of the young Las Vegas’s pioneering entrepreneurs. To date, this movie has never been made, but I can recommend to you the book that tells the whole story — one that, when the film hopefully does get made, they can base it on: Blood Aces: The Wild Ride of Benny Binion, the Texas Gangster Who Created Las Vegas Poker by Doug Swanson.
Well, that’s it for this week’s VIDEO STREET VIDEO STORE! Again, be sure to, ya know…
A new episode of the VSVS drops every Tuesday Wednesday throughout the summer, and, of course, be sure to check out THE MIDNIGHT CITIZEN, your late night broadcast from Birmingham, AL, hosted by me, Mike Boody, every Saturday night. Keep your eyes open!
VIDEO STREET VIDEO STORE 📼 Episode 8