#The Perils of Pauline

[citizenscreen]

April 4, 1914: The popular serial THE PERILS OF PAULINE was shown for the first time in Los Angeles. #OnThisDay

[abuddyforeveryseason]

More manipulated images! With this one, I managed to do what I wanted last time, with Little Red and the B. B. Wolf. I used this french poster as base:

I've got a reproduction hanging in my apartment.

With Microsoft Photo Editor, I removed the blue background. I could've removed the green border too, but I was lazy, and it's pretty much a solid color, I could've changed it manually if I felt like it. (I'm only realizing that now, though).

On FireAlpaca, I separated the image into the blue part and the rest with two layers. I applied the Ben-Day process I figured out on the blue layer, and changed the rest of the image to a red tint. Then I converted the red tinted version to a two-color vector on Inkscape (the colors being pink and brown).

I repeated the process for the red tinted layer, separating it into two layers, then applying the Ben-Day process on both, one being black over a red background (dark red) and the other being red over a white background (light red).

I'm pretty pleased with the result, the other versions of the image I tried to modify, a long honking time ago, don't look nearly as good, see:

Lame!

As for the movie itself - or rather, the serial: It's an adaptation of three American serials (made by a French studio, however), starring Pearl White. You know, she was the inspiration for the Penelope Pitstop cartoons, always getting tied up and chained to a railway by bad guys. In the movies, however, she often got out of those traps without help.

The dude in the poster is the villain from one of those serials, Exploits of Elaine. His name is "The Clutching Hand", and he's one of the first movie supervillains - although Fantômas came first. He's also the first hidden villain, which is why he's got the bandana covering his face. Filmgoers had to go see every episode of the serial to narrow down his secret identity. It was kind of like a superhero franchise, you gotta watch them all.

See, he's got a mask under his mask.

Of course, one of Pearl White's movies, The Perils of Pauline, was produced by William Randolph Hearst, a real-life supervillain, so, let's not give the era that much credit.

[oldshowbiz]

The Perils of Pauline (1967)

[blistering-typhoons]

wonder how it feels being the most beautiful woman ever

[templeofgloom]

so if you were to cast any actresses as fem! Indy and fem!Belloq, who would it be?

TBH I think about Lucy Lawless a lot when writing fem!Indy. She has a similar body type (useful muscle, does action)

(Also gay. This series was very important to me as a kid)

For fem!Renee tbh Pearl White? I love her work in The perils of Pauline and she's so cute <3 For GB Renee give her a slicked back hairstyle and she'd be good. (Pauline was important in the development of the adventure genre so she fits <3 She is really one of the progenitors of Indiana Jones)

I don't know many current actors really sorry. TBH if something like that happened I think some unknowns would be the best call.

[renewablesystems]

The Perils of Pauline (1947)

[theamazingstories]

Replay – MOVIE SERIALS – ALL IN BLACK & WHITE FOR A DIME!

Replay – MOVIE SERIALS – ALL IN BLACK & WHITE FOR A DIME!

Figure 1 – Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow! As I sit here tonight it’s snowing up a treat (if you like that kind of thing) in Vancouver, BC, whose weather is usually about the same as San Francisco; i.e., seldom snowy, often wet and/or gloomy, but sometimes gloriously warm and sunny, even in autumn. Figure 1 is the view out my front door tonight (Wednesday, November 29); what looks like a…

[sohannabarberaesque]

Headcannon, Penelope Pitstop

So imagine our glamour gal, formerly driver of the Wacky Races' #5 Compact Pussycat, standing on the railing of the US 9 bridge over the Ausable River in upstate New York near the legendary Ausable Chasm, looking down upon Perils of Pauline Gorge (as made famous by a potboiler-type scene from the storied silent-era film serial The Perils of Pauline as was filmed there) ... and throwing a modest floral tribute into the Ausable with the notation "To Pauline--whoever you are!"

[rmsqueenmaryonthisday]

Pearl White, Passenger

From the Palm Beach Post on this day in 1937: IN LIGHTER VEIN New York World-Telegram: When the Great Garbo comes back to look us over 20 or 30 years from now, doubtless it will be an event, but we feel quite sure it won’t be so stirring as the return of Pearl White on the Queen Mary the other day. For when Pearl White was giving us her “Perils of Pauline” in the ancient, silent flickers, and…

[pardonmybunion]

So this @laurenillustrated artwork and all the vintage-dream-casting at @hotvintagepoll got me thinking: if Scooby Doo were a thing in the 1890s, then a few years later it would be a NATURAL for silent Hollywood. So who do we cast in Hal Roach’s hit 1915-1919 series of Scooby Doo live-action comedy shorts?

Shaggy and Scoob are both easy, because look, here’s Charley Bowers! He always plays chaotic pottering-around-with-machinery types, which is exactly the vibe that 1890s Shaggy gives, and he does so with a surrealist slapstick edge that’s perfect for the material. On top of that, Bowers is a pioneering stop-motion special effects artist—so he can also be our lead animator, and the rapport between live-action Shaggy and his animated Scooby will be delightful.

Like Shaggy, Velma has to have a certain slapstick quality (“Where are my glasses? I can’t see without my glasses”), so it’s lucky we have Alice Howell—nicknamed “the female Charlie Chaplin” by the tiresome people who use that type of comparison. The point is, she can give Velma the bookish self-possession suggested in the 1890s look, AND also run through a gajillion doors in a wacky hallway chase culminating in a spectacular pratfall.

(Mabel Normand is another contender, but her acting style seems a couple notches too naturalistic for Scooby Doo. I definitely see her directing a bunch of the shorts though.)

Fred needs to be both a conventionally hot manly-hero type and a bit of an idiot, so hello Reginald Denny! This British actor emigrated to Hollywood in the early 1910s, became a comedy star, and played himbos so well that he was still playing them into the 1960s. He’s even in the Adam West Batman movie as the naval hero Commodore Schmidlapp, who’s so ditzy he doesn’t realize he’s been kidnapped by the Penguin.

Daphne is a fun one—let’s assume that by this point, Pearl White is tired of all those straight-up action serials like The Perils of Pauline, and wants to do a spoof for a change. With silent comedy shorts there’s always a chance the plot will wander away and leave the individual gags running the store, and White brings enough tension and gravitas to prevent that situation and keep things moving. At the same time, since she favors action roles, she can easily match the dynamism of Bowers, Howell, and Denny.

And that’s to say nothing of all the silent actors who could appear in bit parts on their way to fame. Maybe the gang tears the mask off the ghost, and discovers it’s an early-career Buster Keaton?

[coffeeandcinema]

In 1963 photographer Bert Stern photographed some of the top actors/actresses at the height of their fame playing their dream roles for a photo series in LIFE magazine's December 20, 1963 issue.

Cary Grant as Charlie Chaplin's Tramp / Audrey Hepburn as Pearl White in 'Perils of Pauline' / Tony Curtis & Natalie Wood as Rudolph Valentino and Vilma Bánky in 'The Sheik' / Paul Newman as a Douglas Fairbanks Sr. swashbuckler / Frank Sinatra & Dean Martin as Judah Ben-Hur and Messala from 'Ben-Hur' / Bing Crosby & Bob Hope as 1930s gangsters / Jack Lemmon as a war pilot / Shirley MacLaine as one of Busby Berkeley's showgirls / Rock Hudson as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

[20th-century-man]

Audrey Hepburn / recreating "The Perils of Pauline" from "Big Stars Take Old Roles", LIFE Magazine, December 20, 1963 / photo by Bert Stern.

[pulpsandcomics2]

Perils of Prehistoric Pauline

[dangermousie]

I feel like I've fallen through to a 1990s Cinemax late night movie (those of us of certain age used to call it Skinemax.)

This is a minidrama so it doesn't have many mins per ep but it spends a significant chunk of its first ep running time on ML slomo pouring booze on his naked chest, demonstrating it knows what's important in life.

Heroine, I know you don't want to be forced into sex in a brothel by a dude marrying another woman (the amount of STDs from that bed alone!) but well...at this particular red flag is hotter than August in the Sahara and minidramas' main theme seems to be "abandon morals for horniness" so I am enjoying your perils of Pauline moment a LOT.

Look at the manly tear sliding down the perfect manly face. Not the secretions that are supposed to be involved in this scene!

This man has a choking kink the size of Brazil.

No bodice left unripped should the tagline of this drama!

I know this is supposed to come across as angsty jealousy but all I can think of is asking a woman to recount sex with another man as you bang her is...well, suffice it to say I never thought I'd see cuckold fetish in a cdrama!

Excuse MEEEEE

He bit her lip holy god!

And then she stabs him and peaces out...

[paulinedorchester]

And all of a sudden, I'm logged in again!

Well all right: this has motivated me to get going and clean up the obsolete Apple devices that have been lying around here so I can take them in and get a credit towards future purchases. But the whole thing has just been weird and stressful.

A bit of a roller-coaster today.

My new printer is now set up, installed, and fully functional. This is nine days after my first attempt to get a technician in here, which was a fiasco of crossed signals and imperious rescheduling. The tech who showed up today didn't get my jokes, but did do the job, so that problem is now solved.

After dinner I looked at my e-mail and discovered that my synagogue's musically illiterate, pitch-challenged song leader, about whom I wrote here (underneath the link), will be leaving us in late spring to take a job in another city. This announcement comes a week or so after two members of our music committee (not me) had coffee with him and discretely sounded him out about whether he aspires to greater responsibilities at our place, which it seems he didn't. It also emerged that he wasn't briefed about our congregation's musical tradition until after he was hired. So that's all very, um, interesting.

On the downside, PBS Passport has locked me out of my account. It doesn't reject my login, it just won't give me a login panel. I've filed a support ticket, but honestly, what next?

[templeofgloom]

The original (1914)Perils of Pauline is great tbh and Pauline there has way more agency than you might expect. That Genre of 'women doing stuff' is often framed, unfairly so in lot of cases, as 'damsel in distress' genre with the idea of women being tied to train tracks dominating that discussion. But what I have seen of things like Perils of Pauline or like Hazards of Helen that is really unfair. That is not to say some of these serials had misogynistic narratives but there are lot of interesting female characters with agency to be found there