Raiders of the Lost Ark turns 30 years old this week, while George Lucas makes plans to digitally tweak the Indy/Marion foreplay scene so that it's now nothing more than an Eskimo kiss

Raiders of the Lost Ark is a movie I've loved since I was a kid in the '80s and have considered the best of the Indiana Jones series, partly because, as blogger Odienator once noted, "Raiders reveals a lot about its characters by showing rather than telling."

Everyone who was involved in Raiders did incredible work in this film, including Steven Spielberg, John Williams, editor Michael Kahn, cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, stars Harrison Ford and Karen Allen, truck chase stunt double Vic Armstrong and even Alfred Molina, in a bit part that was his first role in a feature film (Molina was last seen revisiting the sci-fi/fantasy genre when he played an assistant D.A. who quit prosecuting and was somehow able to get back his never-before-mentioned old job as a cop on Law & Order: L.A.).

Because it's celebrating its 30th anniversary this week (Paramount premiered it on June 12, 1981), here's a clever tribute to Raiders that I first posted in 2009. Ivan Guerrero is a videographer who's a whiz at crafting alternate-reality trailers for contemporary movies out of footage from much older movies. He recently put together a "pre-make" of Joss Whedon's currently-being-filmed Avengers adaptation that showed what the movie would have looked like in a parallel universe where it was made in 1952. One of Guerrero's earlier videos was a similar pre-make of Raiders that used tons of clips from Charlton Heston's Secret of the Incas, a 1954 Paramount B-movie that's been cited as an influence on Raiders.



In the parallel universe that's established by Guerrero's pre-make, their Indy sounds more like Moses than a regular guy who turns into Don Knotts whenever he's around snakes.

Paramount has never released Secret of the Incas on DVD, so Guerrero's fake trailer is one of the few places where we can get glimpses of this proto-Raiders. I enjoyed the fake trailer so much back in 2009 that I even played around in Photoshop and created a snapshot of an old-timey-sounding blurb about the alternate-universe Raiders that would have fit right in with the pre-make.

An old Cheap Seats segment features Chesty McWooden from Twilight

On a recent episode of Sklarbro Country with special guest Amy Poehler (whose laughter I always enjoy hearing, and she does a lot of it during this standout ep, mostly because of James Adomian's hysterical Jesse "The Body" Ventura impression), the Sklar Brothers briefly discussed with Poehler an installment of their ESPN Classic cult favorite Cheap Seats where the brothers snarked on footage of a karate demonstration by a then-unknown Taylor Lautner, a few years before they and the rest of the world became familiar with Lautner and his impression of a wooden washboard in the Twilight movies.

After listening to Randy and Jason mention that 2006 Cheap Seats segment, I had to go YouTube that segment, which I hadn't seen in a long time. Hearing the Sklar Brothers slap around a blue-haired, pre-movie set trailer tantrum-having, 11-year-old version of Lautner made my day. God, I miss Cheap Seats (even though it's finally dropping on DVD!).



The sponsor of that junior karate tournament was Paul Mitchell. Because the first thing I think when I watch martial arts is "Gee, these roundhouse kicks would look more impressive if the kid had frosted tips."

Coffey is the color

To promote the upcoming self-titled album by legendary and frequently sampled Motown guitarist Dennis Coffey, Strut Records recently dropped a fantastic 45-minute mix of old Coffey tunes, hip-hop tracks that sampled Coffey's work and new material from the April 26 release. The instrumental jam "7th Galaxy," a new joint from Coffey's Strut album, starts at 04:55 in the "Constellations" mix, which was assembled by DJ House Shoes. "7th Galaxy" needs to turn up as chase music in a TV show or movie pronto.

The mix includes one of my all-time favorite movie themes, Coffey's Black Belt Jones theme, and another blaxploitation soundtrack tune that features Coffey's guitar work, Edwin Starr's "Easin' In" from Hell Up in Harlem. I was first exposed to "Easin' In" via "Nickel Bags" by Digable Planets, while LL Cool J's "Jingling Baby" introduced me to the Black Belt Jones theme.



I once saw a TCM featurette that pointed out that the Magnificent Seven montage of Yul Brynner and his crew journeying on horseback to the Mexican villagers looked really lethargic and unexciting without Elmer Bernstein's energetic main theme. The Black Belt Jones opening title sequence takes place in the dullest of settings, an L.A. parking lot--not exactly the most dynamic location to showcase the martial arts skills of Bushido Brown Jim Kelly. I guess director Robert Clouse had much less dough to work with than he did on his previous movie with Kelly, the Hong Kong-based Enter the Dragon. Like Bernstein's theme during the Magnificent Seven montage, Coffey's funky theme helps distract you from how shabby the opening title sequence looks despite the fisticuffs (ComicsAlliance editor Chris Sims noted on his Invincible Super-Blog that even the fisticuffs look compromised too: "It may SEEM like Black Belt Jones is moving slow, and that the guys he's fighting are drunk, but I assure you that's not the case. In order to get an 'R' rating they actually had to slow the film down because audiences in the Seventies could not handle that much brutal action.").

(Photo source: Cinema is Dope/Museum of Cinema)

YouTube comments sections are too often full of inane or racist junk, but there was one comment below the video of the Black Belt Jones opening credits that amused me and caused me to do something I've never done before in a YouTube comments section, and that's click on "thumbs up":

"Obama should enter Congress with this theme and kick some Republican butt."

Word.

There are so many hot beats in Strut's Coffey mix, which concludes with "All Your Goodies Are Gone," a terrific blue-eyed soul collabo with Mayer Hawthorne from the new album, a release that Strut hopes will introduce Coffey to a new generation of beatheads. I particularly enjoyed the mix's juxtapositions of "Jingling Baby" with the Black Belt Jones breakbeat and "Easin' In" with "Nickel Bags."

Constellations - The A to Z of Dennis Coffey: A Mix By House Shoes by Strut

[Via Potholes in My Blog]

The Office theme goes electro

Jay Ferguson's theme from The Office has recently been mashed up with the likes of Drake and Lil Wayne. Now it gets a bumpin' electro cover that belongs on the "Cafe Disco" playlist. [Via Kevin Pereira]



From a few months ago, here's the aforementioned "Office Party," which mashes together the Office theme, Drake's "Best I Ever Had" and a certain Miley Cyrus song that's intolerable by itself but becomes tolerable within the context of this sweet mash-up.

"Top 50 worst videogame voice acting"

I've taken several voice acting classes where we were taught to avoid lapsing into the kinds of performances these immensely talented people gave, which is why I love this montage:



[Via Attack of the Show]

Kurt Russell's Miracle gets a hilarious re-dub

I'd like to see the Miracle speech kid recite Escape from New York ("Idun give a fuck about yer war... or yer president").

WHAT IF... Raiders of the Lost Ark were made in the '50s?

YouTube user "whoiseyevan" has been creating what he calls "pre-makes," fake trailers in which '80s and '90s hits like Ghostbusters and Forrest Gump are reimagined as old-timey movies, with the help of footage from other works.

For his latest and funniest "pre-make," "whoiseyevan" speculated what Raiders of the Lost Ark would have been like if it were released in 1951 instead of 1981 (hey, at 1:30, it's the "Attack" theme from Patton, which, in our reality's 1951, won't be written for another 19 years). I'd rather watch this alternate-reality Indiana Jones than the fifth official Indy installment that Harrison Ford recently confirmed is in development (oh God, no). I feel like Sean Connery while the temple collapses around him and Ford at the end of Last Crusade. Lucasfilm and Ford Indiana, let it go. Let the faded franchise go.



[Via Electronic Cerebrectomy]

The Judge Dredd trailer music is like Jerry Goldsmith's two-minute Ramones song

I included the Royal Scottish National Orchestra's out-of-print performance of the late film music legend's kickass theme for the much-maligned 1995 Judge Dredd feature film's trailer in one of this month's A Fistful of Soundtracks mini-playlists. I've also cobbled together the trailer theme and some photos of Goldsmith at work as a conductor for my not-so-active YouTube channel--it's the first video I ever made on Adobe Premiere, which I've used since 1999 to edit together anything I record for AFOS. At under a minute, the hard-hitting, energetic theme is way too short. A film composer who's got the brass ones to tackle Goldsmith ought to take this too-brief Goldsmith masterpiece and write an expanded concert version.

Most listeners' first exposure to the Judge Dredd trailer theme was the trailer itself, but I first noticed the theme when it was used in the 1997 Lost in Space teaser trailer, where it wasn't drowned out so much by gunfire noise and a shouty Sylvester Stallone that you could barely hear Goldsmith's music.

These are the bonuses of the starship Enterprise: Paramount announces its Star Trek Blu-ray/DVD extras

YouTube comedian Shyaporn pokes fun at J.J. Abrams' Star Trek in a funny spoof that calls attention to something I didn't notice even after watching the movie twice: Kirk--whether it's his preteen self or his academy cadet self--does an awful lot of hanging off cliffs during the movie.



Shyaporn's YouTube channel is a must-click channel (X-Men Origins: Wolverine and those YouTube "5000 impressions in 2 minutes" videos get nice skewerings there too). I would have discovered Shyaporn's Star Trek spoof sooner, like back when Abrams' Star Trek was, uh, more relevant, but because I'm Filipino, I'm late to everything.

Star Trek's DVD and Blu-ray release date won't be as late as I constantly am to things. Paramount has announced the street date and bonus features (from a filmmakers' commentrak to deleted scenes that were briefly glimpsed in the trailers), and the date is sooner than I expected: October 8. Here are some of the extras Paramount will include on both the DVD and Blu-ray editions of the summer's most popular and acclaimed blockbuster (suck it, Paramount's other cash cow, Transformers: Revenge of the Fetchit):

- Audio commentary (J.J. Abrams, Bryan Burk, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Roberto Orci) translated into Klingonese

- Audio commentary by a group of irate Trekkies who couldn't enjoy the movie because the Starfleet uniform insignia didn't stick to the original TV series' rule that each Starfleet ship has its own insignia

- Featurettes: "He Blinded Me with Lens Flares!: The Cinematography of Dan Mindel," "Red Balls in Your Mouth: J.J. Abrams' Red Ball Fetish," "How to Recreate the IMAX Experience: Just Press Your Face Against the Blu-ray Player Screen"

- Deleted scenes:

* Spock's birth

* McCoy's birth

* Uhura's birth

* Scotty's birth

* Sulu's birth

* Chekov's birth

* Spock's bris

* McCoy gets taken to the cleaners in divorce court

* Cadet Kirk is reunited with Biggs Darklighter

* Ayel tortures Pike by performing spoken-word poetry

* Nero tortures Pike with a screening of Ang Lee's Hulk

* The explanation for Kirk's swift promotion from cadet to starship captain (SPOILER ALERT: he slept with Fleet Admiral Madea)

Auto-Tune the News: Katie Couric holdin' it down

Auto-Tune may be dead to Jay-Z and music critics, but the haters haven't been able to stop the Gregory Brothers from continuing to give news shows like the CBS Evening News the Auto-Tune treatment.

This is their best video so far.

Classic Star Trek now remastered with added lens flares

This YouTube video by user "partmor" cracked me up--it's the vintage 1967 trailer for the old-school Star Trek episode "Space Seed," but what if it were filled with the lens flares that cinematographer Daniel Mindel (Enemy of the State, Mission: Impossible III) made heavy use of during J.J. Abrams' Star Trek(*)? Someone was obsessed with Holly Valance's naked "Kiss Kiss" video, All Saints' "Never Ever" video and Jay-Z's "Jigga What, Jigga Who" video while working on the new Star Trek.



[Via Geeks of Doom]

And this concludes today's edition of "Stuff That's Funny Only to Cinematography Geeks."

(*) Abrams' Trek is the best Trek feature film since 1996's First Contact. Michael Giacchino's exciting Trek score is a nice throwback to the epic sounds of '80s Trek film composers Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner after years of yawn-inducing, tinny-sounding musical wallpaper by Rick Berman's stable of composers. Giacchino's "That New Car Smell" cue (track 13 on the Varèse Sarabande score album) is straight out of those '80s Goldsmith/Horner Trek scores.

Name that tune: Richard Harris' 100 film and TV theme tunes challenge

British composer and piano teacher Richard Harris will give a prize to the first person who can name all 100 film and TV themes that he plays in less than 10 minutes during a video he posted on YouTube. It looks like no one has been able to identify them all so far.



I was only able to identify 74 73 75 82 83 of the 100 themes. It's that difficult. Three of the tunes I couldn't identify are most likely from chick flicks that not even Jack Bauer could force me to watch if he shot me in the leg.

MARCH 10, 2009 UPDATE: Richard e-mailed me to say I'm at second place with 73 75 right. He wrote, "You're a genius!"

MARCH 11, 2009 UPDATE: I listened to Richard's medley several more times and correctly guessed a few more themes, so as of this writing, I'm now in the lead with 82 right. Richard wrote, "I'm very impressed that you got a couple of favourites that I deliberately threw in to make it a tiny bit harder - [COMPOSER'S NAME DELETED]'s superb score for [MOVIE TITLE DELETED], for instance... no-one else has come close to getting that!"

MARCH 14, 2009 UPDATE: Now 83. Still in the lead.

[Via Pop Candy]