"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day: Babe Ruth, "The Mexican"

Song: "The Mexican" by the British rock band Babe Ruth
Released: 1972
Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: The back half of "The Mexican" is a cover of Ennio Morricone's For a Few Dollars More main title theme (the band was also fond of the Fistful of Dollars main title theme and covered that too on another album). It's a fantastic track that I was first exposed to via the 2002 Strut Records album The Official Adventures of Grandmaster Flash ("The Mexican" is one of Flash's favorite breaks).

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.

Coming Soon to a Theater in an Alternate Reality Near You

This was originally going to be a regular feature on my blog. Two April Fools Days ago, I posted some fake movie posters I made in Photoshop and was going to create some more, but I forgot that I suck at Photoshop, so Coming Soon to a Theater in an Alternate Reality Near You never became a regular thing.

Lately online, I've spotted some amusing posters for movies that don't exist, including a You Offend Me You Offend My Family poster of a whitewashed version of Better Luck Tomorrow, so I'm bringing back Coming Soon to a Theater in an Alternate Reality Near You to compile the cleverest or funniest examples of fake poster art.


I'd enjoy this John Boorman-directed Bruce Lee version of The Matrix way more than the actual Matrix. Poster by Sean Hartter.


Mister Miracle by Hartter.


Black Panther by Hartter.


Coming soon to a TV in an alternate reality near you: the Lost spinoff Reyes and Straume (also by Hartter).


From the Vulture blog's "Date Night–Inspired NBC Team-Ups We'd Like to See on the Big Screen" slideshow.


From a 2004 Television Without Pity Pixel Challenge.


From Fark.com's "movies that never existed but should have" forum.


From Cracked.com's "If Hollywood Decided to Give Everything a Gritty Reboot" contest.


Another Cracked gritty reboot: Edward Norton's Cheers.


Another fake Cheers movie poster, this time from Worth1000.com.

The next three are from Cracked's "Worst Possible Casting Decisions" contest.

Minority Militant header sketches

Below are my sketches for a header I designed for the Minority Militant, a Laotian American blogger and activist from Chi-Town whose posts I've enjoyed reading. He riffs on Asian American-related topics ranging from the ugly racism that's often on display on reality TV to President-Elect Obama's Asian staffers.

Props to TMM for giving me my first job--even though it was a small one--after I lost my regular job earlier this year. TMM has been digging my black-and-white webcomic, The Palace, which I created to keep myself busy (I've been posting the comic here on A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog), so he asked me to draw a new header for his blog.

The sketch of the Asian brother in the hoodie emblazoned with "TMM" is the final version of the image on the header, which can be seen on TMM's blog in all its fully inked, cleaned-up and Paint Shop Pro-and-Photoshop-enhanced glory.