“Beware the Ragman If You Stay Up Late!” (or — A Most Fanciful Flavorof Nightmare Fuel)

EDIT: This post gets a quite a few clicks from people looking for high-quality video from the movie. If this is you, click here to check out a new post where with a better version of the Ragman clip.

Surely, some language must have a word for those dimly remembered childhood events that seem so surreal that you suspect you remember them wrong — that you’re actually remembering a dream, maybe, or that the passage of time and your stupid child brain have jumbled the details. If no word exists, then I motion that one should be created, specifically so I can more easily explain the half-remembered movies and TV shows that I saw on early cable, back when I was too young to be in charge of the remote. Even when the programming was intended for children, the deeper recesses of the cableverse exposed me to some wild stuff.

And one of the weirdest would have to be Nutcracker Fantasy, a Sanrio-produced, stop-motion retelling of The Nutcracker that seesawed wildly between cheerfully colorful and horrifically dark.

The trailer for the Japanese version hints at these extremes.

The version I saw had been dubbed in English. Melissa Gilbert voiced Clara, years before she’d return to voicework playing Batgirl on Batman: The Animated Series. According to the film’s Wikipedia page, Eva Gabor provided the voice of the Queen of Time, whom I have no memory of but who seems like someone that should exist in a Japanese retelling of The Nutcracker, I guess. The page also notes that the film is often mistaken for being a Rankin-Bass production. It’s not, but it’s just as creepy; those puppets herka-jerking around onscreen tread into Uncanny Valley territory just as easily as anything you’d see in Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.

I found one YouTube user who’d posted three of the film’s more beautiful segments — and they do look beautiful.

Sanrio spared no expense on the sets, and this miniature world is one kids should probably like. However, like I said, this movie has a dark side. Even scarier than the snarling Mouse King is another character unique to this version of The Nutcracker: the Ragman, a horrifying boogeyman who haunts the opening few minutes of the film and who walks the streets at night, preying upon children impudent enough to stay up past their bedtime. Believe me, it’s no exaggeration that this clip was posted with the simple description: “Welcome to the worst 2.5 minutes I experienced as a two-year-old.”

Long after I forgot about the rest of this movie, the Ragman lingered. I cannot tell you how many nights of my young life were spent trying hard not to think about the Ragman out of worry that I’d accidentally summon him, because that’s how these kind of things work. It didn’t occur to me that my house existed far from the quaint cobblestone streets that he walked on and that boogeyman can’t fly on airplanes. Watching it today, I’m surprised how accurately I remember it: It’s essentially as scary as I remember.

The quality of that clip isn’t great, but I did find a supercut of the scariest scenes from Nutcracker Fantasy that more clearly demonstrates the Ragman doing his awful thing. The supercut is, alas, set to Orgy’s cover of “Blue Monday,” which you may remember from the I Still Know What You Did Last Summer soundtrack and which exists in a different sector of my brain’s vaguely remembered pop cultural experiences. Still, you get to see more of the Ragman doing his thing as well as other ways the film’s director sought to counteract the candy-colored sweetness of the other scenes.

Rock out and enjoy:

Miscellaneous notes:

• If I remember correctly, Clara’s flights into fantasy land are the result from a terrible fever. Because fevers are magic. Go get a fever, kids!
• Two other inappropriately terrifying scenes from movies intended for children? The Jabberwocky scene from the 1985 version of Alice in Wonderland and the “Bunyip Moon” sequence from Dot and the Red Kangaroo. Go, watch, experience my trauma.
• The English version also includes a performance by Jo Anne Worley as Queen Morphia, and I think there’s a joke in there somewhere but I have yet to find it.
• The person who uploaded the Japanese Nutcracker Fantasy clips has collected a whole lot of older Japanese cartoons. There’s one titled “The Phantom Ship” that’s worth watching — every bit as beautiful and disturbing as the Ragman scenes. Silhouettes are creepy too, just not as much as stop-motion puppets.
• I appreciate how this poster advertising the Japanese release skews more creepy than cheerful.
  
  
  
  
  
• Finally, this little ambulatory strawberry bears a striking resemblance to Toad from Super Mario Bros., don’t you think?

A Pixelated Reminder of Your Own Mortality

Even for the best-coifed and most dignified among us, death is always lurking.

React appropriately when the time comes.

Pixelly things, previously:

• Running Down a Dream
• The Phanto of Paradise
• If the World Had Ended in 1992
• Elevating the Pixel? Or Just Moving It Around?
• How I Prefer to Remember King City
• Thomas Kincade: The Video Game
• Pixels Crashing on a 16-Bit Shore

Fonts and Video Games: A Doubly Nerdy Proposition

If I can pride myself on anything, it’s my thorough command of niche trivia, but I got nothing on this one. Please, can someone with a command of both video games and fonts help me out?

Here is some text that may look familiar:

It’s the logo to this blog. I made it a few years back, and I now can’t remember what font I used. I searched the major font sites and found nothing. I’m pretty sure it came from some eight-bit video game, but I can’t tell which and wouldn’t know how start looking. Do you recognize it? Like, not from this blog? Because it would be helpful if you could tell me.

Thanks in advance if you can.

The Tulips of Los Feliz

Insidious scared me. I watched it on my computer, and it got to me enough that I had to stop watching it that night and finish it again in the morning, when there were fewer places for ghosts to hide. I’m big enough to admit that. And while it had a few good jump scenes — Mr. Make-Up Face playing peekaboo with Barbara Hershey stands out in particular — the scene that lingered the most didn’t have a jump at all. It’s a quiet one that plays our during the daylight — where, as I mentioned, ghosts shouldn’t be able to hide — with Rose Byrne’s character walking outside the family house and then peering in to see a ghost dancing in the living room to “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.”

So imagine my reaction when I was walking up the street and heard that very song playing from a ramshackle bungalow whose picture window gave me a direct look into the living room. I got goosebumps before I actually processed that those ukulele strums where from “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” and I stopped in my tracks. I looked into the living room just in time to see the part where Rose Byrne herself is just looking through the window seeing the ghost. It’s as meta as real life can get — a fictional character in a movie watching a scene play out through the frame of a window, with that scene playing on the frame of a TV screen watched by real people as seen by me, watching through a the frame of a another window. I got caught up in the moment and didn’t realize that the people in the living room had spotted me and that I had become the audience to me watching them watching a movie with Rose Byrne watching a ghost. For just a second, I thought I might explain how I wasn’t actually the creepiest component to this increasingly academic scenario, but then I decided I’d let these nice people just get terrified in peace. And like the dancing ghost, I vanished.

By the way, people know about how the ghost shows up before his big dancing debut, yes? I noticed it, but I wonder if it’s one of those near-subliminal things that slip past other people. If you didn’t see him, he’s in the laundry room, in the left third of the screen at the 33-second mark.

Scary movies, previously:

• The scariest scene in any movie ever, hands down
• A horror movie with 27 titles, each more evocatively ESL than the last
• Similarly, there is also Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key
• Why Psycho II: The Book did not become Psycho II: The Movie
• Three questionable characters from The Exorcist that aren’t Pazuzu

Where Are All the Gods?

Here are the opening credits to a show you probably haven’t seen, and, if you have seen it, you probably haven’t thought about it in years: Cover-Up.

I bring it up only because it’s so strange to watch this slam-bang opening sequence — which plays like so many others from shows I watched in the 80s, what with the posh life contrasted against action, feminine beauty against masculine can-do, Hart to Hart-style — and have it all look completely unfamiliar. I’ve never seen an episode of Cover Up, and it almost seems like a “red universe” thing: superficially familiar even though I know I haven’t seen it. (I would remember a set-up as implausible — even by 80s standards — as a photographer and a special forces agent taking on globe-hopping missions disguised as fashion shoots.) It’s pop culture déjà vu. In the red universe, this Jon-Erik Hexum might have had Tom Cruise’s career — or at least Pierce Brosnan’s.

Of course, he didn’t, but not for the reasons you might think. Just a few weeks into the show’s first season, Hexum accidentally killed himself on set when he fired a gun loaded with blanks into his temple. Amid some controversy, CBS replaced Hexum with a new character played by the equally hunky Antony Hamilton, who stayed with the show until its cancellation in 1984. Hamilton died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1995.

The Hexum-Hamilton split itself seems like a blue universe-red universe thing, but I suppose in the end the paths converged to the same point. Clearly, though, both actors appeared in the show during their prime, and the casting director certainly had an eye for a particular type of leading man.

let: jon-erik hexum; right: antony hamilton

As far as coincidences go, it’s worth noting that the theme song to Cover Up was sung by the subject of a recent post here on this blog, E.G. Daily, who was dating Hexum at the time he died. On some level, that makes me think about what might have made her create a career out of voicing cartoon characters.

Naughty Ducks Dream Adventures

No, that’s not the middle line of a haiku. That’s the Japanese title for DuckTales.

You have to admit: it’s evocative. There apparently exists a semi-translated version of the original NES DuckTales video game floating around online, which has an ending in which Scrooge tells Huey, Dewey and Louie that there is something in the world that is more precious than money or hidden treasure. And it’s the following:

I mean, you’re kind of a dick if your argue with the sentiment or point out that it’s not something Scrooge McDuck would ever say, but you’re allowed to quibble with the grammar. This mangled bit of English was memorable enough that it actual spawned a whole retrogaming website. So that is neat.

And yes, by the way, there’s also Japanese lyrics to the DuckTales theme song:

When She Was Still Spordelia

In the third season of Buffy, Sarah Michelle Gellar has this one scene in which she recalls her life before her character’s vampire-staking days: “Before I was the Slayer I was… well, I don’t want to say shallow but… Let’s say a certain person who shall remain nameless — we'll just call her Spordelia — looked like a classical philosopher next to me.” That’s a description to keep in mind when you watch the 1989 pilot for Girl Talk, which basically plays like a slumber party filmed before a studio audience, sponsored by Tiger Beat, fueled by Fun Dip and held in D.J. Tanner’s bedroom. Girl Talk co-stars Soleil Moon Fry and a girl named inexplicably named Russell.

It’s bizarre to watch baby-voiced SMG prattle on and on about cute boys, especially given the pop culture pedestal we now place Buffy on, and I can’t help but be reminded of a similarly bizarre clip of a 1991-era Jenny Lewis talk about hanging out with her friends in Westwood and then participate in a montage where she tries on a series of increasingly funny hats. (Yes, you should hit that link and watch it.)

Here, maybe you should watch Girl Talk now:

A short viewing guide:

0:03 — The theme song only lasts ninety-some seconds, but you’d be forgiven for thinking it plays nine hours. It also runs through your head with the violence of a ricocheting bullet. Sample lyrics: “School! That’s cool! / It’s the place to be! / All your friends are there / And the talk is free!”

1:31 — The announcer makes the mistake of introducing SMG as Sarah Gellar. I assume he was never heard from again.

1:43 — Please note that poor Russell (left) is dressed like a preteen version of Dorothy Zbornak.

4:30 — In case you didn’t realize that Soleil Moon Frye was THE. SHIT. at the time this episode was filmed, no worries: Russell and Sarah get to introduce her as the extra special, much more famous host of the show.

4:42 — The wisdom of Punky Brewster: “I think my favorite part of school is talking to my friends… especially the boys.” Hooray for education!

6:24 — Again, school is great because that’s where you get to talk to your friends about clothes, music and boys.

7:23 — So one of the things written into the show is that the girls all have crushes on a guy named Neil Tardio, who in real life is a director and the first husband of Tea Leoni. I hope his mention in this episode is how Neal and Tea fell in love. I would also like to think that her legal name was Tea Tardio for a period. Also also? The mention of that oh-so-sexy name Tardio prompts Russell to make this face:

7:34 — Then this happens:

But then you find out that the heartthrob they have visit the show for the first episode isn’t Kirk Cameron or Corey Haim or Chad Allen or any of the others you’d have reason to feel weird about today. No, it’s one you probably don’t have feelings about: Brian Robbins from Head of the Class. He causes much girl-screaming, I’ll give him that. Also, upon his entrance to the stage, SMG stage-faints and remains unconscious for the remainder of the interview.

10:12 — Robbins on shooting two episodes of Head of the Class in Russia: “The people were really interesting, kind of a little depressing. I think they should forget about things like glasnost and perestroika and all that and just paint the place. I mean, a nice shade of blue or something like that.”

13:50 — I have no idea who Safire is, but I’d like to think it’s the woman who wrote Precious, during her peppier teen years.

15:35 — The show also features comedy skits, like this one where Russell and Sarah play lab partners. Sarah is studious and quiet, while Russell blathers on stupidly. In the end, Russell is praised for being wonderful, while Sarah is condemned for attempting science. Hooray for education! The weirdest bit of dialogue: the bizarre brag of “Remember the guy who played the father on The Brady Bunch? Well, his real-life daughter used to go here!” Though for the record, Robert Reed did actually have a daughter. How stoked she must have been to have been included in Girl Talk.

17:20 — After having promised a performance by New Kids on the Block the whole episode, you find out that it’s only Jordan and Jonathan, appearing via a pre-taped interview. Here is how the Girl Talk hosts do “looking interested” when the gay one talks:

21:07 — Jonathan Knight’s advice to kids today about peer pressure: “I would say just be yourself. When people offer you drugs, if you don’t want them, just say no. And the final outcome will be that they’ll just pay more respect to you because you’re being yourself. They’ll respect you for that.”

21:40 — And finally this:

All in all, it’s still better than watching proto-Kathryn Merteuil on Swans Crossing.