Fostering the Fantastic

Now available for streaming on Night Flight Plus is the influential 1977 Fantastic Animation Festival, the first widely-released collection of animated films, which became a hit with midnight movie lovers, was the first exposure for dozens of respected animators, and spawned like-minded follow-up compilations for decades to follow. It premiered on television as one of the earliest episodes of “Night Flight” in July 1981.

For many years, it was difficult for ordinary moviegoers to see any kind of animated short subjects beyond the big studios’ franchise cartoons.

Occasionally, one of the majors would get behind something unique – Columbia Pictures released the Mel Brooks-voiced The Critic in 1963 – but most of the time, you had to go to a museum or other artsy venue to see avant-garde animation, or hope to catch one as filler between shows on a PBS station.

In 1976, programmers Chris Padilla and Dean Berko put together an assortment of shorts at the Laguna Moulton Playhouse in Laguna Beach, California, which sold out multiple shows and drew almost 30,000 people during its run.

An L.A. distributor took note of this success, and proposed that they create a version to play nationwide.

Fantastic Animation Festival, containing sixteen shorts from their event, opened in theaters in 1977 and set records. As Padilla recounted to Variety in 1997, “[It] earned over $300,000 in its first two weeks in sixteen theaters in New York. It had its premiere the same day that Star Wars opened.”

The festival quickly found a following with the “head shop” contingent. Rockers, stoners, and other types who rarely set foot in high culture confines could now go out and see the mind-blowing sights they normally sought from concerts and laser shows…likely with some pre-show “enhancements” consumed in the car beforehand.

Even the ads indicated this was a trip-out event, with an ELO-style spaceship painted in colors reminiscent of blacklight posters from Spencer Gifts.

 Horror writer and historian Tom Weaver, who had worked at sub-distributor Films Inc. once remarked, “We had six or eight prints just in the New York office…and we couldn’t keep ‘em on the shelves.”

This collection did for animation what Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets compilation album did for ’60s music: elevated several artists to world awareness.

The biggest star to rise from the fest is surely clay animation pioneer Will Vinton whose cautionary environmental reverie “Mountain Music” and Academy Award-winning short with Bob Gardiner “Closed Mondays” were standouts.

Due to contractual licensing, “Closed Mondays” was not included in the “Night Flight” broadcast, so you can watch it right here as an appetizer.

Another name that took off after their inclusion here is Steven Lisberger, who created the romantic and trippy “Cosmic Cartoon” with Eric Ladd, and went on to make history by directing Tron in 1982.

There are also some lesser-appreciated filmmakers in this assembly that we’d like to salute.

Ian Emes’ “French Windows,” scored to Pink Floyd’s bass-thumping “One of These Days,” opens this program with a bang. The contrast of orderly, geometric shapes and patterns with fluid, exuberant rotoscoped images of live dancers suggests the paradox of art, the goal of perfection against the human inconsistencies that make each creation special.

Pink Floyd were so impressed by Emes’ film, they played it at their shows, and he was commissioned to create more material to be projected in their concerts, such as this prelude for “Time.”

After creating more art and animation for other musicians like Roger Daltrey and Mike Oldfield, Emes switched to live-action directing, helming the youth music drama Knights & Emeralds, an episode of “The Comic Strip presents” featuring multiple alumni from “The Young Ones,” and the too-hot-for-TV Duran Duran music video, “The Chauffeur.”

Mihail Badica was the first Romanian animator to work in stop-motion, in a more surreal and fanciful style than his fest-mate Will Vinton.

His short “Icar” (or “Icarus”) is a funny but thoughtful observation on how evolution and discovery depends on one soul not settling for the status quo and willing to be ridiculed as they try for what seems to be impossible.

After years of making shorts under the close scrutiny of the often repressive Romanian government, Badica defected to Denmark in 1985, where he works and teaches today.

He recently did the animation for director Helene Kjeldsen’s 2015 short The Outing, featuring music by Nick Cave.

As you’re watching, if you think that we left in an ad break by mistake, you’re wrong: a pair of acclaimed commercials are showcased in this collection as well.

“Stranger” is a wild psychedelic Levi’s commercial about finding liberation through pants, narrated by velvety-voiced Word Jazz artist Ken Nordine, with art direction by graphic artist Chris Blum and rotoscope animation directed by Lynda Taylor.

The spot won multiple awards, including a Clio, in 1972.

Lynda would later have the weird distinction of contributing animation to three sketch comedy movies of the ’70s, all centered around the subject of TV: The Groove Tube, The Firesign Theatre’s Cracking Up, and perennial "Night Flight" favorite, Tunnel Vision!

That’s followed by “Uncola,” an equally groovy 7Up spot with smiling moons, butterfly girls, and hundreds of bubbles, for thirty seconds of eyeball high!

The computer effects came from visual effects forefathers Robert Abel and Associates in a process called “candy-apple neon,” which was later employed in fest-mate Steven Lisberger’s Tron to give that gleaming look to computerized Jeff Bridges.

“Night Flight” was less than a month old when they premiered Fantastic Animation Festival on TV in July 1981. Listen to the commercial bumpers and you’ll notice it’s not Pat Prescott doing the announcing!

As mentioned earlier, not all the shorts that played in the theatrical version were able to be included in the “Night Flight” airing, so, to make up for it, the producers added a bonus short, which we think is really super, man.

Literally, it’s the first Superman cartoon by Max & Dave Fleischer, complete with a brief origin of the Last Son of Krypton’s arrival to Earth, and a mad scientist supervillain with an evil bird and a death ray at his disposal.

The national success of Fantastic Animation Festival led to many spin-offs.

Rock band promoters Craig “Spike” Decker and Mike Gribble, who helped circulate flyers for the original Laguna Beach event, soon launched their own touring shows, most famously Spike & Mike’s Sick And Twisted Festival of Animation, which, despite the death of co-founder Gribble, continues to this day.

And the International Animated Film Association partnered with Landmark Theaters in the late ’70s to release their annual “International Tournee of Animation” shows to adventurous venues for two decades.

Today, you can find animated shorts on cable, on the internet, and in theaters on a regular basis, and we think you can thank some bold artists and a couple brash Californians for stoking that appetite.

Watch “French Windows,” “Icarus,” “Bambi Meets Godzilla,” and more in the 1981 “Night Flight” presentation of Fantastic Animation Festival, now streaming now at Night Flight Plus!

(This essay was originally written for Night Flight Plus. It has been recreated in the style it was presented in at the site, and matched to its original date of publication. Tremendous thanks to Stuart Shapiro and Bryan Thomas for the platform.)

Look What They Done to Our Gals, Ma

 

The 1972 murder mystery What Have You Done To Solange?, part of a wave of stylish and memorable foreign-made horror films during the ‘70s, has recently been added to Night Flight Plus’ selection of titles from the Arrow Films library.

After serving as cameraman to Sergio Leone on his breakout hits A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, Massimo Dallamano struck out on his own as a writer/director, building a reputation for sex-tinged thrillers, such as the very mod Dorian Gray with Helmut Burger.

Around this time, two very popular styles of murder mysteries had emerged in the European film scene.

Italy had fostered the “giallo,” a catch-all term for lurid thrillers involving elaborate killings and sex derived from the Italian word for “yellow,” the standard color of the paperback covers such pulp fiction was printed on.

Meanwhile in then-West Germany, a similar subgenre called the “krimi” (short for “kriminalfilm” – “crime film”), prolific adaptations of books by English writer Edgar Wallace, entertained audiences with secret vendettas and left-field killer revelations.

These two movements were joined in gory harmony when Italian and German producers joined forces with Dallamano in 1972 to create his most well-received and enduring film, What Have You Done to Solange?

A married teacher at a London girls’ college, brazenly carrying on an affair with one of his pupils, becomes the first of many possible suspects when an insular clique of popular chicks are killed off in particularly nasty fashion, and launches his own investigation to clear his name.

We’re not going to tell you much more about the story, suffice to say the terrain of kink and degradation that follows makes it abundantly clear that Solange is not a movie you could remake today.

Solange stars handsome Fabio Testi as Henry, the teacher-turned-detective. He drew worldwide attention in Vittorio De Sica’s Oscar-winning Italian film The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and would become a favorite of Two-Lane Blacktop director Monte Hellman, appearing in three of his films.

Christina Galbo, who plays his student mistress Elizabeth, was previously in another classic perversion-and-murder-in-a-girls-school thriller, Narciso Ibanez Serrador’s The House that Screamed, which recently received an excellent BluRay release from Scream Factory, and has been praised by Guillermo Del Toro as “a powerful, transgressive retelling of the Frankenstein myth.”

Although she does not appear on screen for almost an hour, Camille Keaton makes her memorable film debut as the mute, ethereal Solange herself.

Keaton would later become immortal for playing an assault victim turned vigilante in I Spit on Your Grave, and recently reprised the character for an official sequel.

All of the onscreen nastiness is staged with a gorgeous score by Ennio Morricone, featuring operatic soloing by Edda D’Orso, who previously provided the arias for “Jill’s Theme” in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.

In America, Solange was acquired by genre specialists Hallmark Releasing, who created the legendary “IT’S ONLY A MOVIE” campaign for Last House on the Left, and they released it under different titles for years.

The best known alternate moniker was The School that Couldn’t Scream, which was used in 1977 to suggest it was a spiritual cousin to the Southern horror hit The Town that Dreaded Sundown – the advertising even claimed that, like Sundown, it was based on a true story (it wasn’t), and that it made the bigger film “look like a puppet show!”

Exploitation historian Chris Poggiali has documented all the other names Solange hid under in this post at his Temple of Schlock blog. We’re particularly amused at how they tried to make it look like a cheerleader comedy under the name Rah Rah Girls!

Two years after the release of Solange, Dallamano directed and co-wrote What Have They Done to Your Daughters?, which was not a direct sequel to the earlier film, but did continue the concept of young girls murdered amidst sleazy behavior with authority figures.

This outing blended giallo stylings with another emerging Italian subgenre, the “poliziotteschi”, or “police action” drama, modeled on American hits like Dirty Harry and Bullitt, that offered car chases and cynical politics alongside the slayings.

The handy website The Giallo Files likens this entry to a “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” episode, and indeed, it’s quite interesting to see how salacious stories like this, once the domain of drive-ins and fleapit cinemas, are now fodder for a respected and long-running TV series.

Dallamano had co-scripted and planned to direct a third installment in what was now unofficially called the “Schoolgirls in Peril” trilogy, but the 59-year old filmmaker died in a car accident in November 1976 before he could begin production on it.

The story went through more writers, and with Alberto Negrin taking over direction, Enigma Rosso aka Red Rings of Fear was completed and released in 1978.

Solange star Fabio Testi returned, this time as a police inspector who, in looking into a co-ed’s very brutal demise, discovers a group of “mean girls” at her school up to most unsanctioned extracurricular activities, that make them the next targets of the killer.

Interestingly, long before “Twin Peaks,” Testi’s detective finds the victim wrapped in plastic.

To the best of our knowledge, it’s the only movie we’ve seen where a cop dramatically describes the size of the murderer’s…weapon…to shake school authorities out of their complacency.

Co-starring with Testi were former Warren Beatty paramour and frequent Rainer Werner Fassbinder star Christine Kaufman (who just recently passed away in March 2017), and American expat turned Spanish horror icon Jack Taylor.

The film has been announced for BluRay release later this year from Scorpion Releasing.

Arrow Films now offers the original Solange in a beautiful restored transfer available for streaming at Night Flight Plus.

After you watch it, we encourage you to purchase their Blu/DVD combo edition that includes bonus features, such as interviews with surviving cast members, and an even more thorough history of the “Schoolgirls in Peril” trilogy by horror historian Michael Mackenzie.

For many of us, a great weekend night was watching a scary movie and a helping of “Night Flight.” Now, you can have both in one sitting, anytime you like!

However, beware of secret teen girl squads and black gloves!

What Have You Done To Solange? — along with other selected titles from the Arrow Films library — are now available for instant viewing at Night Flight Plus.

(This essay was originally written for Night Flight Plus. It has been recreated in the style it was presented in at the site, and matched to its original date of publication. Tremendous thanks to Stuart Shapiro and Bryan Thomas for the platform.)

"Tell them they can laugh at me"

 

On this first anniversary of the passing of David Bowie, a loss still felt profoundly by all of us here at Night Flight, we’re taking an opportunity to reflect on his underappreciated capacity for self-deprecation and comedy.

David Bowie constantly tried new things, resisted coasting on familiar credits, and earned enormous respect that continues in his absence. He took his artistic process very seriously.

What he rarely took seriously was himself. In his music videos, in movie cameos, and in the media, he exercised comic gifts that delivered big laughs, often at his own expense.

In the formative years of his career, Bowie compensated for his intense shyness by disappearing into his stage personas and substance abuse. He spent a long sojourn in Berlin to kick his addictions and find perspective, and emerged in the ‘80s with a more positive demeanor.

A key incident that shaped this philosophical turn took place as he was making the video for “Ashes to Ashes” in 1980 with director David Mallet. Bowie recounted the story to technician Michael Dignum during a break in filming for the “Miracle Goodnight” video from Blackstar:

“[I] had quite the attitude as a young pop star, it’s easy to get caught up in the hype. It changes you. So I was on the set [of] ‘Ashes to Ashes’… I’m dressed from head to toe in a clown suit…I hear playback and the music starts. So off I go, I start singing and walking, but as soon as I do this old geezer with an old dog walks right between me and the camera…knowing this is gonna take a while I walked past the old guy and sat next to camera in my full costume waiting for him to pass. As he is walking by camera, the director said, ‘Excuse me, [sir] do you know who this is?’ The old guy looks at me from bottom to top and looks back to the director and said, ‘Of course I do! It’s some cunt in a clown suit.’ That was a huge moment for me, it put me back in my place and made me realize, yes, I’m just a cunt in a clown suit. I think about that old guy all the time.”

Bowie proceeded to engage in what the British call “taking the piss out” of himself for years thereafter.

With director Julien Temple, he conceived a twenty minute short, Jazzin’ for Blue Jean, where he played both a hapless pickup artist trying to woo a resistant girl, and her favorite rock star, “Screaming Lord Byron,” a stand-in for himself.

There are frequent jokes about Bowie’s real-life bad behavior, and in one instance, the would-be suitor insults Byron with, “Your record sleeves are better than your songs!” The video won a Grammy for Best Short Form Video in 1985.

That same year, Bowie played a sleazy hitman in John Landis’ comic mystery Into the Night. In the film, he has a knock-down fight with a bodyguard played by rockabilly pioneer Carl Perkins, a sequence that surely amused him since, as a teenager, he had been inspired to be a musician by listening to 45s by Perkins and his contemporaries.

Bowie’s aforementioned need for artistic freshness became a subject of his mordant humor.

During his 1990 “Sound+Vision” tour, he declared that he was retiring his previous hit catalog from then on, vowing only to do new material in future shows. After the disappointing reception for his band Tin Machine and the solo albums that followed, he began to walk back that promise.

In a promo spot for their joint appearance on the season premiere of “Saturday Night Live” on October 2, 1999, Bowie’s about-face was referenced in an exchange of barbs between himself and host Jerry Seinfeld on their mutual reliance on the tried-and-true.

It wouldn’t be the only time he fired his wit at another target.

In 2006, he played himself on Ricky Gervais’ “Extras,” where, after being annoyed by the self-aggrandizing behavior of Andy Millman, he composes a song on the spot to cut him down to size.

When making the talk show rounds, Bowie was always an urbane and gracious guest, and often participated in sketches.

Here he is sharing a bevy of ludicrous revelations for “Late Night with Conan O’Brien”:

And, in this clip from a 1999 interview on the French Canadian MusiquePlus channel, he shared his love of early internet celebrity Mahir “I Kiss You” Çağrı:

Just before the end of 2016, Bowie’s son Duncan Jones posted a screencap from this interview, calling it his favorite photo of his father.

Having a laugh was also important to Bowie in his private moments.

He released a list of his “Top 100 Reads” in 2013 as part of the touring exhibition “David Bowie Is,” which showcased cherished items from his life.

Amid highbrow fare such as political non-fiction and classics like In Cold Blood, he included the British humor periodical Viz, a Mad-magazine style parody of UK tabloid and music press with a punk rock bent.

While the creators were grateful for his fandom, Bowie himself was not immune from their scathing jokes, as shown in this full-page lampoon from the early ‘90s:

In one of his earliest compositions, “When I Live My Dream,” he wrote, “Tell them they can laugh at me / But don’t forget your date with me / When I live my dream.”

Over five decades after that song emerged, it can be said he lived his dream to the fullest and happiest, and we got to enjoy it with him.

So today, though we’re sad he’s not around, let’s put on one of his immortal songs, and have our own Zoolander & Hansel-style walk-off, and imagine that he’s watching us and smiling at it all.

Night Flight’s video profile of David Bowie from December 4th, 1987, features “Ashes to Ashes” and other dynamic videos from three decades of his career, and is available to watch as part of our special David Bowie collection at Night Flight Plus.

(This essay was originally written for Night Flight Plus. It has been recreated in the style it was presented in at the site, and matched to its original date of publication. Tremendous thanks to Stuart Shapiro and Bryan Thomas for the platform.)

The Fire of Adrianne Tolsch

Adrianne Tolsch, who succumbed to esophageal cancer on December 7, 2016, was a frequent presence on the “Comedy Cuts” segments of “Night Flight.” Many viewers laughing at home may have not been aware of the strides she made for female comedians that followed in her path.

Our Night Flight Plus channel currently has two episodes of “Comedy Cuts” featuring rare footage of prime Tolsch performances.

On our December 18, 1987, broadcast, she discusses the hazards of living alone and her delight in younger men.

And in an October 10, 1986 broadcast of “Comedy Cuts,” Tolsch muses on how men would brag about dealing with female health issues.

This episode also contains performances by Wayne Federman and the black sketch troupe Mary Wong, which featured future Chris Rock collaborator and Pootie Tang star Lance Crouther.

As stand-up comedy morphed from being a simple joke-delivery process into a personality-driven art form in the ‘70s, it was progressing in terms of the subject matter being addressed on stage, but it was still slow to embrace the notion of women discussing such subjects.

The climate was described by Rick Newman, the founder of one of those influential comedy clubs, Catch a Rising Star, in Phil Berger’s The Last Laugh: The World of Stand-Up Comics:

“Back in the mid-1970s when we first started seeing young female comics, a lot of agents and managers who came into the club, and even [television] network people, couldn’t accept them. In fact, sometimes I’d put on a female singer between comedians just to balance the show. And she would do humorous patter between her songs – it’s infectious, I guess, when you work in a comedy club. Well, some of these old-school managers and producers – the typical cigar-smoking characters – would holler from the audience rudely: ‘Just sing!’ Like that. And that was the kind of attitude there was – just no acceptance of a female doing comedy.”

This was the territory that Adrianne Tolsch ventured into and earned a place.

She described it in a 1981 New York Times article this way: “It’s a lot like being in a locker room – you have to fight harder to be accepted.”

As a youth, her father had smuggled her into Lenny Bruce performances, whetting her interest in comedy.

Much like the late Phil Hartman, she had studied graphic arts, and had been working drawing renderings and designing rock album covers, before making a career change to stand-up and improv comedy.

1970 Tommy James solo record, cover art by Tolsch

Tolsch’s first stamp on history came in an unassuming fashion. According to the book Comedy at the Edge by Richard Zoglin, frequent Catch emcee Kelly Rogers asked her to fill in for him one night at the club, so that he could work another show.

While owner Newman initially reprimanded him for not clearing the switch in advance, Tolsch’s positive reception led to her becoming the first regular female emcee at the club.

Tolsch soon became a manager and booker for Catch, and used the position to elevate other women performers.

She would frequently hold Sunday afternoon conclaves for them at her apartment, telling the Times, “There are so few of us that we need to get together. The camaraderie is essential and we are so all over the lot that we don’t get to talk together all that much.”

By the ‘80s, women expanded their presence in stand-up from a 1-to-100 to a 1-to-10 ratio, but there was still market resistance to overcome.

In a New York Times review of Yael Kohen’s We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy, critic Julia M. Klein wrote:

“In the early 1980s, while I was reporting a story on female stand-ups for Ms. magazine, [Adrianne] agreed to arrange a special night of women comics at [Catch]. There was one caveat: She told me that she would be obliged to intersperse a male act between each two women. The clear implication was that no audience could be expected to tolerate a women-only night. Even so, the occasion was a rare enough feminist landmark that virtually the entire editorial staff of Ms., including Gloria Steinem, turned up for the show.”

Her reputation grew as she toured with headliners and opened for major pop stars, and drew worldwide respect.

In 1984, UK newspaper The Guardian cited her with Sandra Bernhard as an important female comic.

When stand-up became a lucrative industry in 1989, another New York Times article featured her insights.

And in 1991, when comedian and cartoonist Russel Harvey shot a pilot for a proposed comedy panel show called “But Seriously Folks,” she was recruited with Mark Cohen, Mike Ivy, and a young Sarah Silverman, to offer her opinions.

RUSSEL HARVEY'S "BUT SERIOUSLY, FOLKS..." (The pilot for "Politically Incorrect.") from Russel Harvey on Vimeo.

Harvey has maintained that talent manager Brad Grey, who had represented him at the time of production, plagiarized this concept in the creation of “Politically Incorrect” with Bill Maher. In one of those you-gotta-laugh convergences, Maher had been a house emcee at Catch during Tolsch’s tenure.

Furthermore, Maher’s successor at the club, Bill Scheft, was an early contributor to “Politically Incorrect” — the two conducted a weekly segment on the program called “Cleaning Out the Notebooks” — and married Tolsch in 1990.

Bill Scheft and Adrianne Tolsch

Scheft often joked about how in his early stand-up days, before their relationship began, he had to audition for her six times before she allowed him to perform at Catch.

In turn, Tolsch frequently made jokes about her two previous marriages and finding suitable partners. Their union lasted 26 years.

Scheft told the Hollywood Reporter, “I could never get enough of people being jealous of our marriage.”

Tolsch always took a mordantly modest view on her accolades.

In Merrill Markoe’s book Cool, Calm, and Contentious: Essays, in the chapter “In Praise of Crazy Mommies,” she described being humbled by her family:

“I called Mom, dizzyingly excited and proud. ‘Mom, Newsweek magazine called me one of the new queens of comedy!’ I said. ‘A two page spread, with a picture and everything!’, and Mom said, ‘You don’t say hello? You don’t say how are you? And we don’t get that magazine here.’ She lived in Los Angeles.”

In the ’90s, as stand-up saw another changing of sensibilities, she transitioned into creating one-woman shows for stage and cabarets, resuming her pre-comedy craft of painting and sculpture, hosting a radio program, and film production.

She and Scheft are producers on the just-completed documentary Take My Nose, Please: Women, Comedy, and Plastic Surgery.

A new solo show, Tolschinsky, had been planned for 2017.

Night Flight offers our condolences, and our laughs, to the Tolsch and Scheft families, and the greater comedy community, which she helped to expand and diversify. We are glad to help keep her memory and jokes alive on Night Flight Plus for future generations to enjoy.

(This essay was originally written for Night Flight Plus. It has been recreated in the style it was presented in at the site, and matched to its original date of publication. Tremendous thanks to Stuart Shapiro and Bryan Thomas for the platform.)

Sorry for Porky Rocking

Night Flight’s April 12, 1985 “New Film and Video” episode, devoted to movie soundtrack tie-in videos, featured Dave Edmunds’ “High School Nights” from Porky’s Revenge, which has just been released for the first time on Blu-ray. The prolific musician/producer assembled an all-star lineup of performers for the film’s soundtrack, including a then-inactive George Harrison. Watch it now on Night Flight Plus.

The late Bob Clark’s loosely autobiographical horny teenager romp Porky’s was a surprise hit, ranking #1 at the box office for eight weeks (bested only by E.T. which held the spot for sixteen weeks), and returning over $100 million during its healthy five-month theatrical run in 1982.

The film — shot in Florida and released by 20th Century Fox — was a Canadian-backed project, thus setting a record as the highest grossing Canuck film of all time, a title it held for twenty-four years.

A sequel, Porky’s II: The Next Day, was written, shot, and released in under fifteen months from the debut of the original, with almost all the original talent retained, the most notable absence being Chuck “Porky” Mitchell.

While it underperformed by comparison, it was still a good-enough hit that Fox wanted a third film. Clark declined to participate, though he would make two more unrelated films for the studio.

Comedian and TV producer James Komack — whose shows “Chico and the Man” and “Welcome Back, Kotter” launched the stardom of Freddie Prinze and John Travolta respectively — took the director’s chair for Porky’s Revenge; the screenplay was by another TV veteran, Ziggy Steinberg, who would go on to write the final Gene Wilder & Richard Pryor collaboration, Another You.

Chuck Mitchell returned as the duplicitous titular tit merchant.

In this promotional behind-the-scenes footage, Mitchell and fellow villain player Nancy Parsons were happy to be back for more:

With the rise of music video as a promotional tool, it was decided that an original song that could be released as a single should be commissioned. The previous two installments had used familiar original recordings of period hits for their song scores.

Dave Edmunds — the versatile Welsh artist who founded Rockpile with Nick Lowe — was particularly fond of ‘50s-style rock, and was asked to create a song for the movie.

While not a huge star in America, he had earlier chart hits with “I Hear You Knocking” and “Girls’ Talk,” recent popularity from his video for the Jeff Lynne-produced “Slipping Away,” and as a producer, he was in heavy demand, supervising the Everly Brothers’ reunion concert and follow-up albums, as well as similar tribute projects for Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Roy Orbison.

As Edmunds gathered talent to join him, he decided to go further than the studio requested, and deliver them a complete soundtrack album.

When Fox and Edmunds’ record label saw the names he brought with him to the project — Perkins, Jeff Beck, Clarence Clemons, Robert Plant, and Phil Collins for starters –- they were probably more turned on by that talented body than by any of the attractive actors in the movie itself.

To accompany the original songs “High School Nights” and the title instrumental theme Edmunds had composed, his friends covered many beloved standards.

Perkins re-recorded his own immortal “Blue Suede Shoes” backed by two-thirds of the Stray Cats, Clemons performed Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn Theme,” Beck performed Santo & Johnny’s “Sleepwalk,” Plant and Collins (as “The Crawling King Snakes”) joined Edmunds on Charlie Rich’s “Philadelphia Baby,” and The Fabulous Thunderbirds belted out Lloyd Price’s “Stagger Lee.”

The participation of the Fabulous Thunderbirds dovetailed with Edmunds’ biggest coup: luring George Harrison — who had not released any new music since his mostly-ignored album Gone Troppo in 1982 — to participate.

Session player Jimmie Vaughan describes an encounter that took place during the making of the album:

“[We] were in Los Angeles recording, and George Harrison was doing something, and he liked what the Fabulous Thunderbirds did on some record. He just asked if we wanted to come in and record, and we’re like, ‘Sure, sure!’… He was great. We were trying to be cool, like, I wanted to go ask him all these questions…we did ‘Stagger Lee,’ but we also had this other [Thunderbirds] song, ‘Look at That, Look at That,’ and George goes, ‘Yeah, that sounds like –‘ Well, he named a song he thought it sounded like. A Larry Williams song or something. He knew every Larry Williams song. He loved Larry Williams.”

For the soundtrack, Harrison recorded a previously unreleased 1968 Bob Dylan song, “I Don’t Want to Do It,” which he had originally made a demo for and pitched to Phil Spector during the making of All Things Must Pass, but did not finish for that album.

Two versions were produced, one used in the film and on the album, featuring an organ solo, and another that was issued as a single shortly after the film opened, replacing the organ with a guitar solo. The latter version has yet to be reissued in any medium since.

During this time, Harrison asked Edmunds to pass word to Jeff Lynne, who was producing Edmunds’ next album Riff Raff, that he wanted to meet up for a possible collaboration. He relayed the message to Lynne some time later.

Once the men met, they would subsequently go on to create Harrison’s hit comeback solo studio record, Cloud Nine, along with the two Traveling Wilburys records. In a way, we have Porky to thank for building the bridge between these wizards of rock!

A track not produced by Edmunds was Willie Nelson performing “Love Me Tender.” The song was prominently featured in a scene where Nancy Parsons as frequent nemesis Beulah Balbricker finally receives redemption through a reunion with a lost love.

Despite the game cast and the pedigreed soundtrack, Porky’s Revenge was a large disappointment upon its release in March 1985. The film was negatively reviewed, and only grossed slightly over $20 million, a tenth of the original’s return.

While the album got good notices, it too was met with poor sales, and the single “High School Nights” never got past #91 on the Billboard Top 100.

The soundtrack’s good reputation, however, has led to three subsequent CD reissues, which have offered bonus tracks, including Carl Perkins remaking his original “Blue Suede Shoes” single B-side, “Honey Don’t.”

Porky’s Revenge is now available on Blu-ray, paired with Porky’s II, and its soundtrack album is back in print, offering old fans and first-timers a new opportunity for raunchy fun and rocking tunes!

In another timely footnote, this vintage episode streaming now at Night Flight Plus also includes the unique promotional video for Milos Forman’s Amadeus introduced by David Lee Roth, where Mozart’s “Symphony No. 40 in G Minor” accompanies a mix of wild pop music moments interwoven with scenes from the film, to present the young composer as his century’s irreverent, convention-rocking, game-changing genius.

As Billboard recently declared Mozart to have the #1 CD sales of 2016, beating Beyoncé, Drake, and Adele (albeit through a clever technicality) that video’s message is still relevant.

Watch our 1985 “New Film and Video” — which also features videos by David Bowie, Glenn Frey, El Debarge, and more — right now on Night Flight Plus!

(This essay was originally written for Night Flight Plus. It has been recreated in the style it was presented in at the site, and matched to its original date of publication. Tremendous thanks to Stuart Shapiro and Bryan Thomas for the platform.)