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glassworkspiderlilies · 5 years

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in for a penny, in for a pound

Kyokou Suiri (In/Spectre) | Sakuragawa Kuro, Iwanaga Kotoko | AO3 Summary: A girl approaches Kuro at the hospital with a proposition. Everything about this situation is absurd. Notes: Watched the first episode of the anime today and then just really wanted to write something for it!! More or less just the events of the first episode/chapter, with a bit more focus on Kuro and his thoughts. Most of the dialogue is transcripted from the manga. Spills a little over into chapter 2 of the manga and kind of references some things that are revealed later on, but shouldn’t be overly spoilery. [EDIT] this fic has been posted up to ao3! that version has been edited a bit more thoroughly. :)

It’s the first time he’s laughed since he’d broken up with Saki-san.

Kuro can’t help it—this girl is, perhaps, a bit cute, despite her oddly archaic way of speaking and her incredible forwardness. He had been teasing when he’d called her a middle-schooler, but he hadn’t expected her to blow up the way she did. It was also amusing how quickly she’d toned it back down, apologizing for her behavior.

It was funny. So he’d laughed. And it’s refreshing, to be laughing for the first time since he’d been dumped. And it’s also a little flattering, to be asked out by a young thing like this enigmatic Iwanaga Kotoko, who has made her proposal so succinctly. All parts of this situation is absurd, and that almost makes Kuro want to say yes, for the continued absurdity.

But considering what happened with Saki-san…he knows what his answer is, and what it needs to be in general, moving forward. Even so, he doesn’t expect to be asked about the reason of his breakup. Kuro tells her, if only to test out his story on his own tongue.

He tries to leave and play it off as something of a joke—perhaps he’s just a pathetic boy who blames his breakup on a kappa, or one who lost his mind from the shock of breakup—but just as he didn’t expect to be asked about this at all, nor does he expect to be contested.

“You weren’t very clear about the subject of your sentences,” Iwanaga says, stopping him from leaving with the tone of her voice, her gaze preternaturally serious like she sees right through him. “Which one of you was the coward that ran and left Saki-san behind?”

Kuro pauses, wary, suddenly, of this girl five years younger than him.

She continues to talk, and the explanation she gives him floors him, though he keeps his face as neutral as he can. It floors him because she is absolutely correct, down to every fine detail, even the words Saki-san had uttered while looking at him with fear.

This girl looks at him without fear, even as she recounts his tale back to him.

He’s not sure if that should scare him.

“I’ve only had one interview with a kappa,” she says, as if his own story hadn’t been just that, a story that he’d expected to be brushed off, “But I am well acquainted with many of their kind.”

She seems—otherworldly, then, as she speaks of yokai, monsters, spectres, and even demons that occupy shadows and crevices and corners, watching them even now.

“Most of them are harmless, but they are everywhere,” Iwanaga continues as she walks towards him, her cane making a softer sound than expected on the flooring. “And when they see you, they whisper to me…‘that thing is different. That—that thing…is terrifying.’”

Kuro crushes the paper cup in his hand, unable to stop the gooseflesh prickling his skin.

“Who are you? How can you be so sure these things exist?” he demands, the words coming out sharper than he intends.

He’s clinging onto the presentation of a normal human being, even as she steps right over those boundaries he’s setting with the total confidence of one who will get what she wants. He’s not used to this, not at all. There are some things he’s careful with—the slip-ups with Saki-san during the course of their relationship had been inevitable, considering how long they’d dated, but hiding what he is is logical, natural. Saki-san had turned pale after every instance that showed his particular constitution and backed away, eyes questioning, accusing. She’d let those little things slide because she wanted so badly to believe, that he was perfectly normal in every other way, but she was certainly unable to forget the things she had seen.

The kappa had been too much.

It’s understandable, ultimately. Really. But Iwanaga…there is not a trace of fear in her.

She smiles at him before answering, perfectly serene.

“They kidnapped me for about two weeks when I was eleven,” she explains, with such ease as if she’s talking about something inconsequential, “They took me into the mountains and asked me, please become our god of wisdom. And my eleven year old self answered them yes, I will.”

He stares at her, unsure of how much to reveal about himself.

“Kinda hard to believe…” he sighs, continuing to play dumb, but Iwanaga merely laughs lightly.

“Indeed!” she says, “So you may look it up in the newspapers. July, six years ago. A fifth grader named Iwanaga Kotoko went missing from the city. One week later, the police went public with their investigation. Another week later, at dawn, the girl was discovered on a bench in the city park, dozing as if nothing had happened. Details were withheld for privacy, but surely in some of the local papers, you’ll find where they wrote, ‘when the girl was discovered, her left leg was severed, and her right eye had been removed.’”

She pushes her hair out of the way with the top of her cane, using her pinky finger to tap her nail against her eye, producing a light clacking sound. A glass eye. She shifts her position, and her skirt also flounces enough for him to see the strap around her thigh, keeping a prosthetic leg in place. Kuro looks at her with disbelief, and she smiles again, putting her arms behind her back in a girlish, innocent pose.

“Of course, the perpetrator was never caught. Since then, I’ve been their God of Wisdom.”

Iwanaga checks her watch and walks past him with a bounce in her step, as if she’s terribly pleased with the results of this conversation.

“It’s time,” she says, in regards to the bus that they’ve been waiting for. “We’ll continue this another day.”

It’s his ride, too, but she seems sure that he won’t follow. She’s right, because he stares after her as she inclines her head and walks away without waiting for a response, still at a loss.

Kuro sees her as the bus passes a few moments later, and she waves. He frowns, checking his phone for when the next one is supposed to come, sighing. He supposes he might as well go to the library to check her story, even though he…believes her. No, even as he knows she has told the truth. Something like this goes beyond mere belief.

He has an inkling, that if he goes to the library, the (more or less) peaceful life he’s had so far will take a turn. He can go home like he had been intending to and forget this ever happened. He can continue as he has been.

Sakuragawa Kuro goes to the library.

She finds him just as he’s leaving the library.

Everything she said he’d find he’d found, of course. And the picture in the newspapers is evidently her, even six years later. Even so, he tells her, it doesn’t prove that she’s become a god to monsters and yokai.

“No, it doesn’t. I may have imagined the whole thing. But if it is a delusion, then I’m just a girl who was kidnapped by some deviant, and lost her mind from the shock of his abuse.”

She uses his own words against him, her expression ever so slightly wry. He has to give it to her—she’s clever.

“You’re free to believe what you want,” she continues, “But I may be the only person in this whole world who can understand you.”

He sighs. She may be right, to an extent. There is, at least, one other person, but…well. That is its own complication.

“Have you had lunch?” he asks, caving just a little. “I’ll treat you.”

Surprisingly, she refuses, having just had an expensive kaiseki meal. Who is she, he wonders, that such a young girl can have a kaiseki lunch.

“With the way you talk, I can’t tell if you were raised in polite society or not,” he says.

“Let’s just say that if I go missing, the first thing that people think is a kidnapping—that’s the kind of mansion I grew up in,” she replies, and that’s already a lot to unpack. “If you marry me, then the land and the house come with me. I can get you a job, too.”

She connects her thumb and index finger and her gaze is intense, and he’s flustered by this offer. Why is she talking like she’s her own saleswoman?

“I don’t want to date you for profit,” he says, holding his hands up, but her gaze intensifies if possible.

“What kind of naïve romantic are you?!” she demands, as if he’s personally insulted her, and he kind of wants to laugh again, at this discrepancy between her doll-like appearance and her seemingly skewed view of the world. “Shouldn’t you get something out of this?”

“Are you sure you should be saying this?” he responds, shaking his head, and starts to walk away. Even if she doesn’t need lunch, he does, and there doesn’t seem to be anything more of proper substance to this conversation.

“Then you admit I’m your type?!” she gasps, following after him.

“No,” he says, easily. It’s true. She’s the exact opposite.

Before he can take his leave, however, a librarian rushes towards them and transforms mid-jog, and then Iwanaga is discussing something that is stalking the halls of the library with the tanuki trembling in her arms. Kuro refuses to come, trying yet again to make an escape—because even though he had come to the library knowing something would change, he’s already satisfied his curiosity quite enough, thank you—but Iwanaga guilts him into coming.

It’s kind of amazing how she succeeds, really. He’s starting to realize he should not, perhaps, underestimate her.

Kuro has been told before that he doesn’t seem to have a sense of danger, but considering that he’s immortal, he can’t help it.

As he watches Iwanaga fly through the air after striking the monster with a fire extinguisher, fear floods him, because even with one eye and leg and God of Wisdom and all, she is still human. If she hits the ground, she will die, and she will not get up. Even earlier, she had unnerved him with her stand against the creature, attempting and failing to speak with it. But him grabbing her to escape from that was easy. Now, as she soars through the air, if he doesn’t catch her—

He does, of course. Dwelling any longer would be counterproductive. Kuro has to sigh at her cheekiness to comment upon her pleasure at being held, and she squeaks when he pulls her closer—not out of romance, but so she cannot be any more reckless than she has been.

“I’m trying to stop you from getting us both killed,” he tells her when she protests, the sound muffled against his chest.

The monster roars, and she squirms against him, her voice high and panicked.

“Kuro-san, run!” she yells, but he’s calm in the face of danger, as he’s always been.

He holds out his arm as the monster opens its maw and Iwanaga turns her head—and strangely, he’s not even worried about what she’s seeing as the creature’s jaws close around his flesh, taking his arm clean off. Blood splatters across his face and hers as well. Iwanaga’s eyes are wide, and she grips his shirt tighter. Her mouth opens and closes once before her words come out properly.

“Then…and now…you have that unconcerned look on your face…how can you be so indifferent?! Don’t you care that you’re in danger?!”

It’s almost sweet, how she’s worried. Her reaction is both expected and unexpected; expected because she’s not pulling away from him, even after what she’s seen, and unexpected because it seems she doesn’t actually know the truth of what he is like he thought she might.

“It’s upsetting to hear that from you, miss leap-before-you-look. I was sure you of all people would have been able to guess.”

She tilts her head in confusion, but at that moment, his body begins to regenerate. Bones, blood, flesh—his arm reconstructs itself, good as new. Iwanaga looks surprised, but not disgusted, and—frankly, he’s more relieved than he’d like to be. He has no reason to want her approval—he’s not sure he even likes this girl, but he doesn’t necessarily dislike her either.

Kuro looks at the monster, which has gone still.

“Thought so,” he murmurs, as its body begins to bubble. “It looks like my meat doesn’t agree with him.”

A few moments later, it explodes and its flesh disintegrates, surprise washing across Iwanaga’s face again.

“Kuro-san,” she says, her voice serious again. He lowers her down and gets up, brushing off his clothes as he begins to walk towards the skeleton that remains. “What are you?”

“Those things ask you for wisdom. Can’t they tell you that?” he says, his back towards her.

“No one likes to talk about the things that truly frighten them,” Iwanaga says slowly.

Kuro thinks about that for a moment. And her? Does he scare her? If she’s scared now, what about in a moment, when he answers her question?

“…True,” he agrees. “Well, to borrow your words…” he turns to her, and her eyes widen at the emptiness on his face. “When I was eleven, I gorged myself on two different kinds of yokai meat.”

She stares. He waits. Truth be told, he’s already said too much by sharing he’s eaten two kinds of meat instead of only one. She didn’t need to know the second part. But he’s told her anyway.

The shock passes, and she looks merely thoughtful instead.

“I see,” she murmurs. “I suppose that would explain the fear from other yokai. They sense the amalgamation in you, which is…unnatural.”

She tries to get up but does so a bit awkwardly because of her prosthetic. He offers her his hand without thinking about it, and she takes it without hesitation.

Kuro blinks at her. She raises an eyebrow at him.

“Kuro-san,” she says, and—he’s had enough for today, he thinks.

“I think I’ve completed my part, here,” he says, the words coming out too quickly. He steps back. Coward, he thinks to himself. “Goodbye, Iwanaga-san.”

She sighs, even as he’s turning away and down half the stairs already.

“I will see you soon enough, Kuro-san,” she calls after him.

He glances back but doesn’t stop moving. She’s smiling at him, and offers a little curtsy.

Kuro wonders if he should feel threatened.

Briefly, he remembers that night, with Saki-san. How she had clung to him and called his name, only to start shaking, and then let him go with horror in her eyes.

He supposes there’s something wrong with him, that there’s some satisfaction in having this uncanny girl come after him.

Iwanaga does, of course, appear the next day at the hospital, peering around his side to look at the flowers he’s brought for his cousin. He’s not even surprised.

She’s worried for him, even after what she saw, repentant about the fact that she was the one who brought him into the mess.

He explains about the mermaid meat, grabs one of the rose stems from the bushes nearby, dragging his hand down its length. The thorns cut, his hand bleeds, and he opens it to show Iwanaga the wounds healing. She watches with less surprise than yesterday.

“I’ve lost fingers, been burned pretty badly, but I don’t have a single scar,” he tells her.

Iwanaga thinks. “Since ancient times, it’s believed that eating mermaid flesh bestows ageless immortality…but you don’t look eleven.”

“I think the other yokai meat I ate nullified some of the effects,” he says, his eyes distant as he looks down at his hand, “But it’s possible I will stop aging at some point.”

Iwanaga looks at him, tilting her head to the side.

“You said you ate two types of yokai meat. What was the other one?”

He smiles faintly at her.

“…I need to get going, otherwise I’ll be late for my visit.”

She sighs, but allows him to drop the topic.

“Very well. I suspect we’ll be seeing each other frequently for a long time to come. I’m sure I’ll have ample opportunity to ask you about yourself.”

“You can still say that after everything I’ve told you?” he asks, with some mild disbelief.

“Well, I do find it somewhat upsetting,” she says honestly, and this simple admittance doesn’t hurt him at all. “And I’m sure it’s why your relationship with Saki-san ended in ruin. Outwardly, you are the very picture of naiveté. But for my part, having you by my side is a welcome development both romantically and for solving yokai problems. Two birds, one stone!”

She twirls prettily and holds up to fingers to illustrate her words. She looks perfectly cheerful, for someone who had just found out something so disturbing so recently. But he supposes, as the God of Wisdom as she says she is, and a girl who had lost her left leg and right eye to supernatural creatures, his story, though unusual even to her, is not as big of an upset as it would be to someone else.

“…Are you sure you’re not being too logical about this?” he asks, is eyebrows furrowing. Because the fact remains that he is unnatural. Yokai and other such creatures are natural, especially to her, even if most humans cannot see them. They are part of a natural order that she is meant to keep.

He falls outside of that order. Shouldn’t she be thinking of getting rid of him somehow, then, instead of positing a relationship?

“What’s wrong with that?” she pouts, breaking him out of his thoughts. “And if we could just ignore the fact that my appearance doesn’t match what appeals to you, this would all be solved handily.”

He sighs.

“That’s not the problem and you know it,” he says, shaking his head. He isn’t ready to broach the topic he was just thinking about with her. He doesn’t know her well enough yet. “And you never said yokai extermination would be a requirement for this relationship.”

It’s funny. It wasn’t as though he ever said yes, but somehow—he’s already in it, this relationship.

“Most of their problems can be solved their consultation,” Iwanaga says easily, “And with you by my side, there won’t be any major upsets.”

He chuckles a little.

“What happened yesterday wasn’t a major upset?”

She looks a bit sheepish at that, turning her head in slight embarrassment.

“Sometimes things don’t work out,” she admits, “It was unfortunate for that cow that it couldn’t see you. But it’s very rare for a spectre to see you—part human, part yokai—and not be filled with dread. It would be quite the monster that doesn’t find you frightening.”

He stops short, just after they walk through the hospital doors. Kuro thinks about that, and wonders what that makes her, if yokai, monsters, spectres, and demons fear him. Humans are more fragile than yokai, and if humans are more intelligent, then they know above all what should be feared.

Iwanaga Kotoko fears neither humans nor the supernatural. So what does that make her? Her being a God of Wisdom is merely a title; she will say she is human when asked. So the fact that she doesn’t fear him and wants to date him (as a preamble to getting married, no less!)…what does that make her?

It would be quite the monster indeed.

He can’t think of her as a monster. So what is left? A true god?

Kuro puts a hand to his forehead. This is all too much. Even so, he’s her boyfriend now, whatever that entails or means in this situation. She’s too logical and unromantic and oddly risqué for him to think that being her boyfriend will be anything like being Saki’s. It’ll come with its own troubles, he can feel it, but…it doesn’t feel bad.

“Why did you stop?” Iwanaga calls to him, “You still have time—as my new boyfriend, the least you could do is walk me to my appointment before your own, you know.”

He sighs, but his lips quirk into a resigned smile once she turns her back to him, pouting slightly.

“Yes, yes,” he says, and offers his arm for her to hang onto.

She blinks at him, mollified.

“Well, now,” she says, “You do have some manners after all.”

“Moreso than you, sometimes,” he says, “How did you learn to talk like you do when you were raised in polite society?”

“Hey!” she says, pouting again, “There’s nothing wrong with being forthright. And seriously, what kind of idea of polite society do you have anyway?!”

He laughs, and continues to do so as she gets even more irritated, her cheeks reddening with frustration.

Yes, in some ways, he doesn’t think this will be bad at all.

#kyokou suiri #inspectre #in/spectre #iwanaga kotoko #sakuragawa kuro #fanfiction #celebratory fic for the first episode release??!#puts one (1) fic in the mostly empty tag :')#referenced my copy of volume 1 way too much for the dialogue #probably should've written something different LOL but this is what came out #anyway i...love this series a lot actually #yay for episode 1!

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chiseler · 6 years

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THE GREATEST FILM COMPOSER NO ONE’S EVER HEARD OF

Over the course of roughly two decades, from the early Fifties to the late Sixties, Herman Stein composed the music for nearly two hundred films and television shows. If you’re of a certain mindset, he wrote some of the most memorable music for some of the greatest films ever made, including Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Incredible Shrinking Man. You’d never know it, though, as he only received credit on about half a dozen of the pictures he worked on. Trying to find a complete filmography can be a daunting task. Even his IMDb page is sorely incomplete and rife with inaccuracies.

In the mid-Nineties, while planning to launch a small record label devoted to releasing soundtracks from forgotten sci-fi and horror films from the Forties and Fifties, David Schecter set himself the task of tracking down some of the composers who’d worked on those pictures. Fully understanding most of these composers would have been in their eighties or nineties, at the very least he would contact their families or estates in hopes of gaining access to their written scores. One of the first he tried to find was Herman Stein.

“I don’t remember where I found the information,” Schecter recalls. “But Herman Stein had apparently died in 1984. His obituary was in Variety. So I began placing calls around town to every Stein I could find. Given there are a lot of Jewish people in Hollywood, I think this took up about a month of my life. I left messages all over town saying, ‘If you are a child of Herman Stein, please call me back. I’m trying to find out where his archives are.’ Then I moved on to other composers. One day the phone rang and my wife Katy came up to me and her face was white, and she said ‘That dead guy is on the phone.’ And I said, ‘Which dead guy?’ And she said ‘Herman Stein.’”

When Schecter picked up the phone, Stein, who had a reputation for being a bit cantankerous, demanded to know why Schecter was trying to get in touch with him.

“I said, ‘You’re THE Herman Stein?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but how could you have heard of me? No one’s heard of me.’ I explained that he had four cuts on that Dick Jacobs record, Themes from Horror Movies, from 1959, and I’d always loved his music. He seemed really suspicious and curmudgeonly. I explained we were thinking of starting a label and wanted to record some of his film music. He wanted to know what titles, and I told him his science fiction stuff—It Came from Outer Space, This Island Earth, Tarantula and on and on. And he said, ‘Why would you want to do that crap? Do my Westerns.’ And I said, ’Nobody cares about your Westerns.’ I mean, he scored dozens of these Audie Murphy Westerns, Rock Hudson Westerns, and you have to remember those were the prestige pictures back then. Those were the ones the composers were proud of. The science fiction stuff was just disposable. So I tried to convince him people still knew who the Creature from the Black Lagoon was, and he didn’t believe me.”

Upon leaving the movie business two decades earlier, Stein and his wife Anita retreated to their home in the Hollywood Hills. He didn’t go to the movies, he didn’t read about movies, and if one came on the television he’d snap it off. That was all part of his past life, and it didn’t interest him anymore. In fact, Schecter says, he was happy to hear about that Variety obituary, as it meant he had an excuse for not dealing with people anymore.

“I remember one thing that was really interesting to me and kind of put things in perspective,” says Schecter. “I told him I wanted to record some of the music from The Mole People, and he said, ’Did I do that picture?’ Even though every time that movie came on when I was growing up, whether it was five in the afternoon or four-thirty in the morning, I’d be up watching it. For Herman, it was a job he worked on for three ore four days in between a Ma and Pa Kettle movie and a swashbuckler, and that was it. And he probably only saw the part of the movie he scored—the opening scene. It would be like me asking you, ‘What did you do on July 17th, 1984?’ Chances are you have no idea, and Herman didn’t remember it at all. It made me realize I was coming from a very different perspective than the people who actually wrote that stuff. For them it was just product they were cranking out. It doesn’t mean they weren’t doing brilliant work, just that they didn’t obsess about this stuff.”

At the time Schecter contacted him, the only bits of Stein’s music to be recorded and released on an album appeared on that legendary 1959 Dick Jacobs record. Truth Be Told, it was a pretty shabby recording, performed by what was probably a seventeen-piece ensemble which, lacking a harp, substituted an organ instead. Schecter wanted to record his music properly and faithfully. As gruff as he was, it seems Stein still had some interest in the proposition.

“So he said he wanted to give me a test. I asked him what sort of test, and he said basically ‘to see if I can trust you with my music.’ I thought, oh boy, I’ve chosen the wrong composer. Bernard Herrmann had a reputation for being difficult, and Herman Stein was difficult in his own way. Anyway, he sent me a cassette with three pieces of music on it. The instructions were to listen to it, then call him up and talk to him about it. I had no idea what I was supposed to talk to him about, but I listened to it, then called him up and just gave him my two cents worth. Apparently, and I still don’t know to this day why, I passed the test with flying colors, and he said ‘Okay, tell me what you want and I’ll get it.’”

Stein began coming over to Schecter’s home with music, Schecter began releasing Stein’s scores on his Monstrous Movie Music label, and the two remained friends for the next dozen years, until Stein’s death at age 93.

Herman Stein, born in Philadelphia in 1915, had been an astounding child prodigy. He began playing piano at age two, and first performed with an orchestra at age six. In his teens he was selling compositions to jazz ensembles, orchestrating for the likes of Count Basie, and through his twenties was composing and arranging music for the radio.

“How he learned music was, he went to the library, and he’d look at the classical scores there. Just study them,” Schecter says. “He was entirely self-taught until he came to Hollywood, and he was already in his mid-thirties by then.”

After scoring an industrial film called Career for Two, Stein took a job with Universal’s music department in 1951. His first assignment involved arranging some classical pieces for the Boris Karloff picture The Strange Door. The first things he actually scored himself were a few musical cues for a 1952 Ozzie and Harriet vehicle, Here Come the Nelsons.

“Thing about Herman, he was…different,” Schecter admits. “He had a brilliant, brilliant mind. People talk about perfect pitch, but he said perfect pitch isn’t important. If you’re a composer what’s important is having relative pitch. He would hear everything orchestrally in his head before he wrote it. Most of the great composers couldn’t do that. They would sit at the piano, hit a note, write the note down, hit another note, and so on. Herman would just sit out in his car in the parking lot at Universal and write the scores out.{Fellow Universal film composer} Irving Gertz said he and Henry Mancini would walk by, and they could see Herman in the car transcribing the music he heard in his mind. They would just shake their heads. He was taught by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who taught everyone in Hollywood how to score films—Jerry Goldsmith, John Williams, so many others. Castelnuovo-Tedesco taught Herman to think everything out before he wrote it, and to write his scores in ink. You see sketches written by other composers and they’re in pencil and there are a million cross-outs and erasures, and that was just normal. It’s like being a writer like you and I are, you need to edit things. Herman wrote things out in ink, and apparently did not need to change them.”

The other thing about Herman, Schecter says, was that he was, even into his eighties, something akin to a human computer.

“I remember one day when I was doing some research on something. Herman had all his cue sheets and musical manuscripts in a closet at his home in Hollywood. I called him up one night and asked him about a piece of music he’d written for a Western in 1954. And I said, ‘It’s a piece called ‘On to Socorro’ or something like that. I told him I was wondering about why he did something the way he did there. And he said ‘Hmm, let me think about that for a second.’ He went over to the piano, and all of a sudden I heard this full orchestral version coming out of the piano. He’s not just hitting the notes with one finger, he was playing with flourishes and everything. You could hear the brass the way he was playing. It was about a two minute piece, and he’d played it perfectly, so far as I could tell because I’d been watching the film version. He got done with it, and I asked how he’d found the music so quickly. He said ‘Didn’t—I did it from memory.’ I asked him when he’d last heard the music, and he said ‘Only at the recording session.’ He’d written literally thousands of pieces of music, he’d written this one back in 1954. It was performed once, put away in his closet, and that was it. But he could play every single nuance of it fifty years later. He could do that with anything he’d written.”

In the early Fifties, Joe Gershenson was the head of Universal’s music department, and his second in command was composer Milt Rosen. Stein, Irving Gertz, Henry Mancini and others were mere contract composers. When a new picture was finished, it was determined how much time was left before the scheduled release, and how much money was left in the budget for music. Then Rosen, a couple of the composers, and the music editor would get together for a screening.

“They would decide which parts needed music and which didn’t,” Schecter explained. “They’d be doing that with the music editor, who’d be writing all these things down. Then depending on how much time they had and what the budget was. They would decide which parts needed new music, because that would take more time given the composer would have to write it, as they’d have to derive parts for the orchestra to play. All that versus how much older music they could use, maybe re-writing it slightly, or just re-using it as is. I’m not talking about using original recordings. But the written music. They already had the scores and the parts there, and wouldn’t have to spend the money on the copyist, and they wouldn’t have to spend the time. Some films would be completely scored, others would be a mix of new and old music, some would have nothing but older music. Then one or more of the composers would rearrange that older music to make it fit with the new music.

“Let’s say a few composers—Mancini, Gertz and Stein—were working together on a picture like The Monolith Monsters. For some reason, Irving Gertz scored most of The Monolith Monsters. Eighty percent of it. Some of the music came from earlier pictures, but the majority of it was written for that picture. And The Deadly Mantis, too—they were both the same score, so to speak, written at the same time. But then there were a few pieces Mancini wrote. Maybe Irving was running out of time, or maybe he had to work on something else. I have no idea. But someone told Mancini ‘Here are your three pieces,’ and they’d give Herman his three pieces. Sometimes the composers would talk to each other, sometimes they would play each other the themes they were using, so they’d have some kind of continuity. Sometimes the scenes a certain composer would be writing were so discreet from what the other composers were doing—maybe they just had to do with a certain subplot—so they could score their own things and it wouldn’t conflict with the rest of the picture. That’s one of the appeals of the Universal scores from the Forties and Fifties—there’s so much musical material in them. It wasn’t just one composer writing a couple themes and then doing endless variations on them. You listen to Creature from the Black Lagoon, even though the Creature theme is in there, Hans Salter’s music sounds like Hans Salter, Herman Stein’s music sounds like Herman Stein. Henry Mancini’s music sounds like Henry Mancini. Then there’s some older music by Milt Rosen that sounds completely different because it came from other pictures. There’s also a cue by Robert Emmett Dolan from Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, which had nothing to do with any of the other pictures that provided music. You end up with an incredible wealth of musical material from these grade-B horror films.”

In the end, however, particularly if there were multiple composers involved in scoring a picture, as music director it was Joe Gershenson who got the sole screen credit. This explains why Stein’s contributions went uncredited for roughly ninety-five percent of the films he worked on. So maybe it’s easy to comprehend why Stein would be a bit cantankerous.

“Herman was really something,” Schecter says. “Unfortunately he was his own worst enemy. He was a curmudgeon, and he had reason to be. Some really terrible things happened to him over his life that probably would have destroyed many a weaker man. So Herman could be bitter at times, and I understood that. But he was also very funny and incredibly smart. He should have done so much better in terms of his career, but again he was his own worst enemy. He was very opinionated, and very ethical. In Hollywood, there are not a lot of people with ethics, and Herman would call you on it. That’s why we got along so great, because I’m honest all the time, and Herman knew he could trust me. But he burned a lot of bridges, unfortunately. After the music department was taken down in 1958, Joe Gershenson wanted him to score John Huston’s Freud. I won’t tell you what Herman said, but it was very insulting to Gershenson . It was also very true, but he shouldn’t have said it. Gershenson told him, ‘you’re never gonna work on another film again,’ and Herman didn’t, except for {Roger Corman’s 1962 feature} The Intruder. Maybe that’s one of the reasons he liked The Intruder so much.

When the music department was dissolved, Stein, Irving Gertz, Hans Salter, Mancini and the others suddenly found themselves out of work. Gertz moved over to 20th Century Fox, and managed to bring a few others with him, including Stein. For the next decade, Stein would compose the music for TV shows like Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. A young Jerry Goldsmith, meanwhile, snagged his first high-profile job by scoring Freud back at Universal.

“Mancini was and unbelievably talented composer,” Schecter says. “Herman was also unbelievably talented. I think Herman could have had a much better career than he did. Mancini early on had the reputation for being the tunesmith. Whenever there was a song, they would ask Henry to write it, or they’d bring in one of their staff songwriters, or they would go to a freelance person. But Herman could write some really, really, beautiful melodies that he had hoped would be turned into a record so he could have a hit. But Universal didn’t allow him to do that. He got kinda bitter over that, and I can understand why, because I’ve heard some of his tunes. Just listen to ‘Sand Rock,’ the cue that opens It Came From Outer Space right after the main titles. Just absolutely gorgeous music, and you could have easily thrown lyrics on that and had a hit song, but they weren’t going to do that for Herman.”

Stein and his wife lived quietly for two decades, Herman focused on his commodities investments, until Schecter lured him back out into the world by calling attention to his music.

“It was both good and bad,” he says. “He always let you know how much you were putting him out, but you could tell how much he liked it beneath the rough exterior. When someone would call him up from a TV or radio show, he’d just light up. He felt he’d been forgotten, as a lot of these composers did. It was kind of difficult at the beginning. And I think there was a little resentment there—‘Oh NOW they’re discovering me, now that I’m too old to get jobs out of it.’ You can understand that, you don’t want to be recognized when you’re on your death bed, you want to be recognized when you can still produce. Herman was well aware of the career he could have had. I’m glad he lived long enough that I could show him books that make reference to him and his music.

“He still did amazing things,” Schecter went on. “To my mind he was the sound of 1950s science fiction. As wonderful as the other composers were. Herman was involved with a lot of the bigger, more important films. The scenes that he scored and the way he scored them, that’s what you think of when you think of the science fiction films of that era. One thing about Herman’s style that set it apart from the others, he could use dissonance to his advantage. He didn’t write atonal things like Alex North, where sometimes you don’t want to listen to them because they’re so harsh. But he could push the envelope, especially with the brass, to where it bordered on being dissonant, but it wasn’t. So he could create these sounds that sounded like horror and monsters, but were also fun to listen to. They didn’t repel you, they didn’t hurt your ear drums. I think that was his strength. You listen to the cue ‘Visitors from Space’ from It Came From Outer Space, and you can hear him pushing it so close to where it’s gonna hurt, but in the end it’s beautiful. You could probably slow dance to that piece, but it’s definitely strident. When you listen to all his music from all those movies, you say, ‘Yup, that’s 1950s horror.’”

by Jim Knipfel

#Jim Knipfel #The Chiseler #Herman Stein #The Creature From The Black Lagoon #It Came From Outer Space #Horror Music

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votives · 8 years

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2016 in Review

Last year I wrote a month-by-month summary of 2015 for my own benefit. I found it last week and it was really fun to see what happened in my own personal life. This is that, but for 2016. A lot happened in the world, but this really is just about my own personal life for me. If for whatever reason you care, feel free to read on. Cheers to 2017!

January: I rung in the new year with my friend Edel and two of her long-time friends, which was casual and fun and a great way to kick-off a year that I wanted to base on self-improvement and self-love. Nearly as soon as I got back to school, I got a job at my favorite coffee shop (which I’ve been working at for almost a year!) Not even a week later I was on my way home from d-hall dinner with my gal pal WXJM friends I made in fall ‘15 when my former roommate called me and told me that there was a package waiting for me when I came home. When I got home and opened my bedroom door, I was sprayed with confetti and a group of strangers (who just spent time in my horribly decorated room complete with a Rupert Grint cardboard cutout) sang the JMU fight song to me — I got into Student Ambassadors! Winter Storm Jonas barricaded me in my apartment allowing me to catch up on all my favorite movies, but also made me shovel several feet of snow out from around my car so I could drive to my first day at work.

February: I started having friend-dates to find a mentor in SA and knew within 10 minutes of my coffee date with my friend Taylor that I needed her as my mentor. Emma came to visit one weekend, which was significantly less messy than the time she visited the semester before. A little later, at the mentor/mentee reveal, Taylor and I found out we got each other and pretty much became friend soulmates. (Things have continued as such). We started going to weekly yoga together. I had my first tour and became polo official. This month was heavy in that organization. It was also during this month that I absolutely crushed hard on this guy in one of my writing classes. We had the same political views, he was incredibly well spoken and funny, and he was literally a surfer from Hawaii. We went to a house show together, got lunch once or twice and hung out at the library on several occasions, but at the end of the day it didn’t go anywhere.

March: Meredith, my parents & I went on a cruise for spring break. The first cruise Mer or I had ever been on. Was less then great, as one of our stops got cancelled (we were supposed to go to the Ernest Hemingway house) but it was still absolutely amazing to spend a week exploring with my best friend. Highlight: cave-diving in Mexico with Mer & my parents. I had my one year mark with The Breeze. I think everyone was a little shell-shocked when I didn’t apply for editor the month before, but I had just gotten the job and the organization and didn’t want to be overwhelmed. I was getting over Hawaiian boy when my friend suggested I go for this really outgoing boy I met a house show. He was a ball of energy and made me look quiet. With her help, he and a few of his friends became a part of our growing friend group and I tried to spend more time with him. Macrock happened which was 1. amazing 2. horrifying. I missed more of it than I would have liked to, but it was because I was having so much fun with my friends. I volunteered to help at the door of a random show, and ended up working the heavy metal show, also.

April: Either mid-March or early April I got really close to a handful of seniors in SA, which was the most devastating thing I could’ve done. I spent a lot of this month at the library or d-hall with them, and I spent a lot of weekends at their houses. It was around this time that I also developed a crush on a senior in WXJM who was planning to stay another year, which was good timing because I realized that my friend had slept with the boy she was helping to set me up with. I was named top writer in my section for The Breeze, and spent a growing time with my SA friends as I got disenchanted with WXJM for a little. We found out that our fourth-roommate, who we thought was living with us this current year, never signed the lease. I don’t think I ever actually said goodbye to her in person.

May: I went to the beach for a week with a bunch of friends which was partly horrible and partly amazing. There was a ton of unavoidable drama, but I also learned that sharing a pullout couch with two other people makes you really close. I adopted a Jimmy Buffet mentality for the week and spent the entire week trying to be as happy and carefree as possible, and it worked. My parents, during this time, were moving from our 2015 residence to a house we’re currently renting closer to my dads work. When I got back, I interviewed for and got an internship for the summer. I’m a sneaky ass, so when I hung out with a bunch of friends the day before my birthday I decided to not mention my birthday to any of them. One of my closest friends, Lizzet, knew though and had secretly brought a gift. I got a bunch of angry texts at like 1 in the morning from friends mad that I didn’t remind them. The morning of my 20th birthday my mom informed me that the night before, my little cousin had been diagnosed with Leukemia. I cannot explain how devastated I was and still am about that. Later in the day, Meredith & Josh drove up to visit and spend several days with me. We went to DC, Great Falls, and watched a ton of Gossip Girl & Parks and Rec.

June: I started my internship. I got surprisingly into Gossip Girl. Edel and I started to get lunches fairly often to discuss the weirdness of being a 20 year old but also having a business-casual job. My godson, Ben was born! We sold and moved out of our lakehouse of eight years, which was weird to say the least. I went to visit Emma, Autumn & Emily in Richmond. A lot of it didn’t go according to plan, but some highlights: I spent a TON of time with Daniel, Junaid, Ian & Dan (the senior friends and their roommates from April) and Autumn & I met fuckin Josh Radnor (aka Ted Mosby) when we were out to brunch. Had a mUCH needed catching-up session with Lizzet when I got back.

July: We moved into our new lakehouse! The goal is to move out of the rental next year and my parents will move full-time to the lake. I went to my school apartment for a weekend to move-out and got to spend much needed time with Taylor and a friend Maddie who left my organization. Moving out of my apartment was weird, because I hated it but it had a lot of memories. Edel and I started a food instagram. Autumn came to visit me at the lake, which included trips to get icecream, kayaking ventures, tubing and trying to watch the stars. I went to NC for a weekend to see my much-missed high school friends. It was overwhelming and amazing and I could’ve spent another week easily.

August: Met up with a friend from high school who happened to be interning in DC and went to my first ever Nats game. Meredith and Josh came to the lake for a weekend, the third time I got to see her this year which is honestly a miracle. Autumn and I moved in to our apartment on the same day, after only being assigned it like three days before after a summer of roommate assignments that fell through. We spent a lot of the night cleaning, then the rest of it unpacking and trying to get ready for orientation (We were FROGS: First Year Orientation Guides). My FROG group was amazing: my partner was a perfect contrast to me, and we ended up having a ton of mutual friends. My entire group of FROGs got really close together, and I particularly bonded with a friend named Taryn who is honestly just me. We’re pretty much twins. We also were both trying to start being some form of vegetarian at the same time, which is how we initially bonded. My first years kind of hated me at times and I didn’t have the same experience as most of my FROG friends, but I’m still really grateful for it.

September: First few weeks of school were super fun because none of my responsibilities had really kicked in yet, so I could do whatever. I went to my first JMU tailgate which was incredibly fun, and I got to go to several games in the beginning of the season when I missed all of last season. Bikash and I started our third season at WXJM, Bear Necessities. I had dinner at the university presidents house. Emma and I became friends again, after a little bit of a hiatus.

October: Realized that I have a crush on a good friend, which always sucks. Didn’t do anything about it. Taylor and I saw Chance the Rapper live, which was super weird and super amazing and the most fun. Taylor took me to the lavender farm because she just gets me. We went with the boy who ghosted me, which was weird, but it’s ok. Autumn turned 21! We had a bunch of people over to our apartment. It was so fun. I got a little in WXJM and she’s perfect. She’s my year, she’s cooler than me, and she’s incredibly vocal about the phenomenal things that she is passionate about. I went to Minnesota one weekend for my cousins wedding and got to see my moms side of the family, which I always miss. I impulse bought a razor scooter, which I once rode to work to make fun of my coworkers. Meredith and Josh came to visit JMU for Hallow-homecoming! A bunch of my alumni friends were also visiting that weekend. I didn’t get to see a lot of alumni, but I had a ton of fun with Mer and Josh: highlights include briefly going to a tailgate, going to Rocky Horror and going to Benny’s.

November: Lizzet turns 21! I went to see Beach House in Charlottesvile, which was an amazing show and an interesting night. I got enough confidence to ask my lingering crush from last semester out to get pizza, but I’m pretty positive it was just as friends because that was the last time we talked even though it couldn’t have possibly gone better. The election happened, which was depressing. I participated in a live discussion on feminism for The Breeze, which was great. There was an armed man barricaded in my apartment building one morning and my roommates and I were told by a police officer (one of many surrounding my building) to evacuate and run to the clubhouse, where I stayed for several hours (not forced) to get updates. It ended peacefully. Mer turned 21 and I missed it, which sucked. For Thanksgiving we went to NC for like 4 hours, which was nice but brief.

December: Taylor’s birthday! I got her a stuffed goat from You’ve Goat Mail for Christmas and I’m still absurdly proud about it. Lizzet took me to the Smallpools Concert for free, but we accidentally missed the meet & greets. I went to a Christmas Cocktail where I only knew a few people and walked away with a bunch of new friends: namely, a house-dog. I either got food poisoning or the stomach bug, who’s to tell. Operation Santa Claus happened and was super fun. After months of stress, I was accepted into a study abroad program in Italy, which my friend Emily is going on too. I had a really stressful academic end of the semester, but left for break feeling really good about the next semester. I have every intention to apply to be a section editor for The Breeze. I still have a crush on my friend that I realized in September and still haven’t acted on it. I’m torn between going for it or letting it go. Time will tell. A bunch of my family got sick over Christmas, and somehow I didn’t. So I’m either a huge successful germaphobe or I already had the bug. We binge watched The OA, and wow. My brother gave me a ton of records and my mom made some new pillows for me, so I decided to transform my room since we’re staying in our apartment.

for 2017:

Looking forward to applying for editor

Looking forward to hitting one year @ black sheep

Looking forward to getting my own mentee in SA

Looking forward to studying abroad

Looking forward to turning 21

Hoping my cousin becomes cancer free

Hoping we get to go on last year’s planned NYC trip, which we delayed

Hoping I either make a move or give up on that boy

Hoping I get back into yoga & stay relatively healthy

#about #self

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fromtheringapron · 7 years

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Coliseum Critique: WWF Rampage ‘91

It’s so easy to write off the WWF Coliseum Home Video releases of the ‘80s and ‘90s as merely products of their time because, well, they are. And truthfully, it’s tough explaining their appeal to anyone who wasn’t fortunate enough to have them on the shelves of their local video store back in the day. But thanks to the WWE Network finally caving to years of demand, they’ve been uploaded for critical reappraisal. That they’ve been so requested by fans suggests they’re were more than just a fad, and I’ll be exploring why with the Coliseum Critique.

I chose to start with WWF Rampage ’91 because, um, The Rockers teaming up with The Big Bossman? Count me the fuck in. In all seriousness though, I feel like this tape is pretty exemplary of the Coliseum Home Video library. There are a bunch of random matches strewn together, with some silly segments sprinkled in between. That may not seem like much in a time where big matches are given away for free on Raw every week, but matches between two name talents didn’t happen all the time on TV back in ’91 so something like Road Warrior Animal vs. Paul Roma is made to feel all the more special and important. It’s almost like not showing all of your roster on TV every week to the point of overexposure can actually work in getting everyone over. Hmmm.

Anyway, let’s get down to it. I’ll be structuring these reviews a bit differently than my regular ones and I’m honestly still figuring out how to do that so bear with me:

Golfing with Sean Mooney, Gene Okerlund, and Bobby Heenan: This is a series of segments shown between each match, but I think it’s best to keep it as one entry because I’m lazy. It’s not a proper Coliseum Home Video release if Sean Mooney isn’t hosting it. It’s hard to describe the appeal of Mooney, but I do think it has something to do with the fact he seems like your average newscaster who just so happens to be thrown into the wacky world of pro wrestling and deals with it accordingly. He’s also not unlike Julie Chen on Big Brother in the sense that his awkward, stilted manner of talking actually enhances his charm.

He’s joined by Okerlund and Heenan at a golf course, which is apparently located in Stamford, CT and is probably just Vince McMahon’s backyard. The segments are mostly just Heenan being incompetent at golf despite Okerlund’s attempts at giving him lessons. That’s another thing about Coliseum Home Video. You’ll get these random segments that have nothing to do with wrestling, but are nonetheless a delight. It’s just a hoot seeing larger-than-life characters try to do everyday stuff.

Intercontinental Championship Match: Mr. Perfect (champion) (with The Coach) defeated The British Bulldog via disqualification: Perfect and Bulldog wrestled each other a lot on the house show circuit in the spring/summer of ’91. Mooney keeps calling Perfect “The Flawless One” on commentary and it annoys me a great deal. Stop trying to make fetch happen, Sean. This match also gives us a rare look at Perfect’s short-lived manager The Coach, who is such a downgrade from Heenan and is super unnecessary. Since they’re setting up Bret Hart as the top contender for the IC title by the time of this match, he shows up in Bulldog’s corner mid-match but winds up causing Bulldog to get disqualified when he attacks Perfect. If I were Bulldog, I’d actually be pissed at Bret for costing me the title. He really couldn’t rise above his tiff with Perfect to help his brother-in-law win the title? I guess Owen was right; Bret is too damn selfish.

The Texas Tornado fought The Warlord to a double count-out: This takes places in Madison Square Garden. The Warlord’s look is amazing, sorry. Seriously one of my favorites. I know some people mock it, but I dig the Phantom of the Opera meets Star Trek vibe of it all. You know who doesn’t look amazing? The Texas Tornado, who is wearing years of drug use on his face by this point. I’d say more but HOLY FUCK JIM NEIDHART IS ANNOYING ON COMMENTARY. I have no idea why they thought his work in 30-second Hart Foundation promos would translate into hours-long television broadcasts, but this match takes place smack in the middle of that experiment. As for the match, both guys get counted out of the ring, but Neidhart’s commentary caused me to nearly blackout so I kinda feel like I missed most of it.

Road Warrior Animal defeated Paul Roma (with Hercules): Different MSG show, same annoying Neidhart commentary. What’s really distracting here though is that the order of the classic red/white/blue ring ropes has been switched up, with blue as the top rope instead. It’s amazing how just swapping the red and blue ropes can suddenly make the WWF look like a knock-off indy fed. Anyway, Roma and Hercules flip a coin before the match to see who will wrestle Animal but since this is Power & Glory post-WrestleMania VII, they’re already losing either way. No idea of Road Warrior Hawk’s whereabouts during this match, but I’m guessing it’s due to an injury, drugs, or the classic wrestling mix of both.

The Big Bossman & The Rockers (Shawn Michaels & Marty Janetty) defeated The Mountie & The Nasty Boys (with Jimmy Hart): One of the coolest things about Coliseum Home Video is that you’d sometimes get these ultra rare team-ups you would never see on television. The Rockers teaming up The Bossman is a prime example, so my enjoyment of this match largely coasted on that basis alone, or maybe it’s just because Shawn wears one of those silly Rockers hats to the ring completely stone-faced. I haven’t had the opportunity to talk it about it before, but The Mountie’s entrance music is incredible. It’s like an aerial shot of the Canadian Rockies put to sound. Just beautiful. On a grim note, it’s taken me forever to realize the Bossman is wearing the Confederate Flag on the sleeve of his shirt. And here I thought he was problematic for killing Al Snow’s dog and ruining the funeral for Big Show’s dad.

The Dragon defeated Demolition Smash: Simply referring to Ricky Steamboat as “The Dragon” does not feel kosher in any way, but that’s what the WWF wants us to roll with. Like, I get they wanted him to appeal to younger viewers, but didn’t he already do a pretty a good job of that in his first run just by being Ricky Steamboat? The funny part is that The Dragon was actually my introduction to Steamboat, as I owned his Hasbro figure growing up. This is from the same MSG show with the messed-up ropes. Again, distracting. Watching Demolition Smash here all by himself makes me deeply sad. He’s stripped of everything that made Demolition the top tag team in all of wrestling just a year prior. No Axe, no Crush, no Rick Derringer entrance music, no S&M masks. Even Mr. Fuji has bailed on him. No wonder why he turned to a life of Long Ranger masks and stealing people’s stuff. The poor guy had nothing.

The Barbarian (with Bobby Heenan) defeated Jake Roberts via count-out: My mind drifted during this match, admittedly. I will say The Barbarian’s look is also amazing. They really did a good job of making sure both former members of the Powers of Pain look like total badasses. This takes place during that special time where Earthquake murdered Jake Roberts’ pet snake Damien on TV. Quake gets involved in the match here to continue the feud, although when he came to ringside I started thinking what it would’ve been like if he were managed by Heenan instead. Like, I imagine Heenan would’ve quickly picked up a guy whose raison d’etre was once to put Hulk Hogan permanently on the shelf, yes? The downside is that we’d be robbed of those amazing promos where Quake is bouncing around with Jimmy Hart shrieking in the background. Anyway, The Barbarian holds a victory over Jake Roberts. How about that?

Greg Valentine defeated Haku: This is from the other Rampage event, broadcast exclusively in the UK a month after WrestleMania VII. Vince McMahon and Roddy Piper are on commentary for this. I don’t really have much to say about the match, other than Greg Valentine as a face is super weird. It’s such a contrast to his “grumpy bus driver” aesthetic.

Power & Glory (Hercules & Paul Roma) (with Slick) fought The Orient Express (Kato & Tanaka) (with Mr. Fuji) to a double count-out: Okay, this is the random ass shit I want out of a Coliseum Home Video release. You see, kids, a classic Coliseum Home Video match isn’t a showcase of technical expertise or a high-risk spotfest. Rather, it’s the matches that make you stop in your tracks and say, “Um, what?” That’s simply the Coliseum Home Video way, and a generation of fans accepted it.

Heel vs. heel matches are already pretty rare for this time period, but what also makes this match a bit of an odd duck is that both teams were on their way out by the time of this video’s release. The Orient Express never got that huge of a push, but Power & Glory look like a shadow of the fresh-faced tag team they were just a year prior. Hercules in particular looks like he’s aged 10 years, and I could probably write up a separate entry on the dreariness of Herc’s final months in the WWF alone. It’s appropriate that this match ends in a draw considering both teams are going absolutely nowhere. And, wow, two Paul Roma matches on this tape? Coliseum Home Video, you sneaky temptress.

At Home with Paul Bearer: I love skits like this. It’s fluff, yes, but it’s also character development just for the sake of it. This honestly would’ve freaked me out as a kid, especially the part where a human corpse falls out of Bearer’s closet. Bearer shows us his cocktail bar where he makes his favorite drink, a Bloody Mary except we’re supposed to believe it’s actually blood from a dead person named Mary. He can also make a Bloody Jane, Cindy, and Tom. His favorite book is Death of a Salesman which, I mean, cool if you like it, Paul, but I’m personally not an Arthur Miller fan. He’s also apparently inherited the Macho King’s throne after Randy Savage retired from that role. I’m kinda disappointed we didn’t get to see the rest of his home. What’s his bathroom look like?

The Ultimate Warrior defeated The Undertaker (with Paul Bearer) via disqualification: The Warrior/Taker feud is proof that you can go totally out there with a storyline and still have people invested in it. I mean, I’m pretty sure the basis of the feud is that Taker tried to murder the Warrior by locking him in a casket, which in turn triggered Warrior’s claustrophobia (there is a lot of attempted murder in early ‘90s WWF, if you pay close attention). Warrior then sought guidance from Jake Roberts, who trained him by burying him up to his head in a grave and later betrayed him by leading him to a room where he was bit by a fake cobra in a box. Um, okay, not sure how they’re getting from point A to point B there, but whacked-out shit like this is why I watch wrestling.

It also helps that I actually dig the Warrior/Taker pairing because I think the characters compliment each other quite well, with Warrior’s frenetic energy contrasting nicely to Taker’s cold, emotionless demeanor. One thing that surprised me about this match is that Warrior gets his ass kicked for much of it. Taker is really being made to look like a legit threat around this time, which sets him up perfectly for Hogan later in the year. He gets some of Warrior’s face paint on his gloves, which Lord Alfred Hayes on commentary seems to mistake as human skin on commentary. That’s a tasty visual if there ever was one.

And with that, the tape reaches its conclusion!

What I’ve Learned: Coliseum Home Video releases were a great way of developing characters without worrying about putting them near a wrestling ring or wasting any precious television time. In retrospect, they also serve as a nice history lesson as to what the feuds and roster were like at the time of the video’s release, and this particular tape gave me plenty of insight into the state of things in the spring/summer of 1991. Yes, the matches are randomly strewn together, and they wouldn’t be able to pull it off successfully today, but it’s a nice reminder of a time where booking made matches between wrestlers on the lower end of the card still fresh and important. Other things I’ve learned: Bret is too damn selfish, the works of Arthur Miller aren’t interesting, The Bossman isn’t quite as reputable a policeman as everyone thinks, The Barbarian and The Warlord are the fashionistas we’ve always needed, and Jim Neidhart should stay far, far away from the commentary booth.

#wwe network #coliseum home video

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