Good Ass Blog

Hot Lines Hot Songs #4

“Kick in the door waving the four-four. All you heard was Poppa don’t hit me no more.”

Hot Line: Get Money- Jr. Mafia

Hot Song: Kick In The Door- The Notorious B.I.G

Unsung Source Material #5

Scott Sanders’ 2009 Blaxsploitation send-up Black Dynamite begins its third act on Kung-Fu Island, where the titular hero traces a government conspiracy to his old nemesis, the Feindish Dr. Wu. As Black Dynamite and his party make their way through Dr. Wu’s lair, one of the party members starts talking about the farm he wants to start with is girlfriend after he gets home. Obviously, he’s abruptly killed by a spear from an unknown assailant before he can finnish. When Black Dynamite asks if anyone saw where the spear came from (in an expertly botched line reading from star and creator, Michael Jai White), the rest of the party, facing profile left, point upward diagonally.

At 6:01 p.m. on Thursday, April 4, 1968, the reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down while standing on the balcony of room 306 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The sound alerted Joseph Louw, a South African photographer who had been working as King’s documentarian. Louw exited his adjacent motel room, camera in tow, just in time to capture King’s aides, Jesse Jackson, Hosea Williams, and Ralph Abernathy, showing law officials below which direction the fatal gunshot came from. Each of them facing profile left, pointing upward diagonally.

Black Dynamite, set in the 1970s, is stocked with references to the cinema and politics of the era, though this one is on screen so briefly it barely registers. I had the pleasure of asking Scott Sanders himself about this shot about a year ago during Q&A after a screening of the film at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre. Judging by the audible gasps in the crowd, I seemed to be the only one who caught it.

Fictional Evil Corporations #11

MomCorp

Futurama

Groundbreaking And Racist #3

Triumph Of The Will

Coincidental Incidents #5

(I’ll try and have the video up again soon.)

There’s an episode of Taxi from 1981 where Louie, Danny DeVito’s character, turns on his TV just in time for the theme of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. A show he wouldn’t star on for another twenty-five years.

The source of this is retroactively mesmerizing television moment is a song called “Temptation Sensation” by German television composer Heinz Kiessling. It’s a royalty free piece of production music, used in low budget programming and commercials, intended to be totally innocuous. These days you can’t hear it without thinking of four of the most loathsome protagonists on TV.

In the same regard, it’s impossible to watch this scene from Taxi (episode 405: Louie’s Fling) without getting the eerie feeling that Louie is unknowingly staring into his own future.