Lio by Mark Tatulli for January 28, 2017

I never liked that foul film with fowls.

Eh, it was a cheep movie.

Read the short story, it is gratis on the Internet.

I loved the trailers and TV ads for the movie. One voice says, " ‘The Birds’ is coming." The other says, “Don’t you mean ‘The birds are coming?’” And Who’s on first.

I saw “The Thomas Crown Affair” in 1968. (Yet another fine movie horribly remade in 1999. Must have been an apocalyptic fin-de-siècle affliction in the movie business that year.) There was an incredibly erotic kissing scene between Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway that everyone talked about. When I saw it, some prankster had smuggled into the theater a box or cage of live chimney swifts, a large flock of them. During the big kiss, they released them from the balcony area… which actually was closed at the time. They were panicked, flying aimlessly, bouncing off walls and landing in women’s hair. But because they have great vertical clinging skills, they eventually settled on the walls and on the movie screen. So there were McQueen and Dunaway with birds all over their faces and a packed theater full of people either laughing or screaming in terror. It was actually a peak movie going moment for me… though I had to go back and see the movie a second time to experience it sans birds.

I used to watch that channel as a kid. WKTV is channel 2 in Utica, NY. They didn’t play the monster movies. A channel from Syracuse played Monster Movie Mattinee every Saturday afternoon.

The antenna-ed CRT is back, though you would think Weird Kid TV would be a specialty cable channel.

Hitchcock marathon? Scoot over, Lio, I brought some popcorn!

That’s one way to build a fan base; especially if they all have Twitter accounts….

TMC did that on his birthday. Thursday and Friday they ran a Debbie Reynolds marathon. Some real good ones, and not just Singing in the Rain and Molly Brown.

I like watching reruns of the Alfred Hitchcock Program. I like the episode where Joseph Cotton is in a car wreck and can’t speak and everyone thinks he is dead. What a powerful episode. Anyone else like it?

That was an especially original episode, brilliant TV. Sadly, I doubt today’s viewers would sit through it.