School's out for the summer thank God and the livin is suddenly easy on Moonbase.
The weather's pleasantly warm after last week's scorching sunburst here in Blighty. Returning to a cooler garden the Grandkids have been busy harvesting early summer vegetables like apples and cucumbers and selling them us on their 'market'!
Junior and me have discussed making a space pak too, like the one carried by the Gemini astronauts. We have an old canister from an abandoned dehumidifier and a discarded washing machine pipe.
Put together they really do look the part like the portable support unit on the Project SWORD annual cover [which looks more like an old car battery charger than anything]- did you have that book as a kid?
Some straps might even turn it into an astronaut's chest pack like the one Action Man had when I was a kid. Did you have this cool outfit [picture from flickr]?
Currently me and Junior are watching The Wizard of Oz, whilst Little Miss has an afternoon kip. What I hadn't realised was that the characters Dorothy meets in Oz are all characters she knows on her farm in Kansas! Its an amazing movie although my Grandson is still making his mind up I think!
Do you like the Wizard of Oz? Ever had any collectables. I had a Mego Dorothy about 10 years ago, found abandoned in a Reading charity shop!
Ding dong the Witch is dead!
Ah! the movie the Wizard of Oz.
ReplyDeleteHere in the US it was shown on network TV every Easter in the days before VCR tapes etc.
In 1988 when she nearly four my daughter joined me to watch the annual viewing of the movie.
We had just recently bought a colour TV and I wanted to watch the beginning when the b/w movie transforms into glorious MetroColor with Dorothy's arrival in Oz.
When that scene passed I reached for the remote to turn it off when my daughter said "No Daddy!"
We watched the whole movie, me sitting, she standing in front of the TV. At the scene where Dorothy starts to dance/skip down the Yellow Brick Road my daughter started to copy the dance moves.
The movie was broadcast again a few months later by which time we had a VCR recorder. I duly taped the film avoiding the commercials. My daughter wanted to watch the taping every day and we agreed to limit it to Monday, Wednesday and Friday, with weekends an option if there was time. This lasted a year and a half.
My mother back in the UK was a skilled seamstress. On being told of her granddaughter's obsession, from the reference of a xerox of a b/w photo of Judy Garland as Dorothy my mother made a replica blue and white dress that my daughter wore for Halloween.
Although a vociferous reader my daughter would never read any of the Oz books. I did buy some figures from the movie that she played with along with her Sesame Street Muppet figures. While the movie must have been viewed over a hundred times by her, a young cousin had been scared by the flying monkey's and would never watch it again. So it's very much a love it or hate it movie.
I first saw The Wizard of Oz in a theatre, and did not really care for it. Saw it again on TV years later, and enjoyed it. An excellent movie. I did buy my Mother a Dorothy doll years later - perhaps a Mattel Barbie ? That is now in a box, somewhere in my storage locker. Do not recall anything else.
ReplyDeleteIt's a great movie, with some excellent on set, in camera effects. Particularly impressive is the disappearance of the Wicked Witch which is carried out by use of a pyrotechnic and a trap door in the floor, and the tornado vortex in the distance, which is an inverted cloth cone puppeteered top and bottom across the set, with a fan blowing dust or smoke at its base. Fantastic !
ReplyDeleteMy parents took me to see The Wizard at the Richmond Odeon in the early sixties. I remember being frightened of the flying monkies!
ReplyDeleteA few years later my dad was taking me to see Bushido films! We saw Toshiro Mifuni in Rebellion and I remember us travelling to the Putney Globe to see Seven Samurai and not being admitted because it was X Certificate!