Today, I have a new post up over at Splitsider concerning the greatest thing Bill Murray has ever done: The Looney Tunes 50th Anniversary Special. Click on this this link, watch the clips, and tell me I’m wrong. I dares ya.
This is seriously one of my favorite hours of television ever and it will become yours, too, once you watch it. I COMMAND IT.
As I’ve already written, it’s been a rough winter for Mets fans. We don’t need to go through it all. No really, we don’t. But it’s okay to be happy about opening day/night. Really, it is. I promise.
Why? Because baseball just a damn sport. I love it and I’ve loved since I was a kid and in all likelihood I will continue to love it up until and including my grave, but seriously. Let’s keep things in perspective. If the Mets won eight World Series in a row, that wouldn’t appreciably change your life in any way. It would be pretty awesome, but let’s be honest: You wouldn’t have done anything. There is nothing more sickening than a fan who tries to lord a championship over another fan by crowing about what we did. No, they rose to the pinnacle of their profession. You sat on your ass and inhaled nachos while watching it on TV.
So as the 2011 Mets season embarks on its epic journey, I would suggest all of you take the advice given by Mr. Bill Murray in this clip from Meatballs. Repeat it to yourself in times of stress. It will help. Honestly, it will. Because in the final analysis. it just doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter. IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER.
Let the record show I don’t hate everything about the holidays. When I was a kid, I had a VHS tape of holiday specials and other stuff recorded around Christmastime, 1985. I rediscovered it years later and loved to watch it over and over for the old ads, plus a truly awesome special about the 50th Anniversary of Loony Tunes.
This special featured various celebrities speaking about the beloved cartoon characters as if they were real people with whom they’d worked. It’s a bizarre panoply of famous folks, from Chevy Chase to Danny Thomas to David Bowie, who pretends to not know Bugs Bunny, then admits “we might be doing an album together”.
But the best clips come from Bill Murray, who, as always, was pure genius. I’ve actually made mp3s of some of his improv dialogue and put it on my iPod; whenever it pops up on shuffle, I am always delighted. You can view this special, in chunks, on the Loony Tunes Golden Collection Volume 2, but I just had to share a few of Mr. Murray’s best bits, even if it’s not the best quality video. In this first bit, Murray reveals a few behind the scene glimpses of the working relationship between Friz Freleng and Yosemite Sam.
In this second clip, Murray talks about the Loony Tunes characters he does and does not respect.
Billy Dee Williams also knows how to bring the funny. Here, he reveals the music he puts on when he wants to get a lady in just the right mood: Carl Stalling. His little gestures, as if saying, “ah yes, that’s lovely” as cacophanous cartoon music plays, are priceless.
Continue reading Holiday Triumphs: Christmas Ads from 1985, Pt. 1