This sketch comedy TV show from 1979 features what is probably the first ever TV appearance of Spinal Tap. I was planning to post this right before Spinal Tap II: The End Continues came out, but I got distracted by shiny objects and the movie came out last week.
Alas, the sequel seems to have done very poorly at the box office, so I might just have to wait for it on DVD…
…it’s only that his metabolism has gotten more selective.
Tony Hendra, Spinal Tap manager Iain Faith in This Is Spinal Tap, dead at age 79.
(Hat tip: Dwight.)
There’s such a fine line between clever and a crooked movie studio:
The three members of Spinal Tap and the director of the 1984 movie about the fictional band are involved in a very real lawsuit against the media company Vivendi.
Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Rob Reiner have joined an earlier suit filed by Harry Shearer that claims Vivendi and StudioCanal have denied them profits from the 1984 rockumentary.
The amended lawsuit was filed in California federal court yesterday, according to The Hollywood Repoter. Shearer filed a fraud and contract-breach lawsuit last October. The original damages set at $125 million have been increased to $400 million.
The three actors, along with director Reiner, state they were given only $81 in merchandising income and $98 in music sales over the past few decades. They also claim to have not received accounting statements for the past three years in regards to This Is Spinal Tap.
$400 million? Well, that’s just nitpicking, isn’t it?
Here’s a modestly amusing link for a cold Sunday morning, a video interview with Spinal Tap manager Ian Faith on faking his own death, why “Big Bottom” is better than “Stonehenge,” and who he could make a lot of money off of were they to die.
Keep you expectations modest…
Thirty years ago today, from the place eardrums go to die, the Greatest Mockumentary Ever Told premiered:
Here’s Siskel & Ebert’s original review:
And this is pretty much obligatory:
…there’s only one possible musical choice.
The men behind Tap decided they’d like to go out and perform without the having to get into character. Here’s the result:
Strangely enough, unwigged.com now seems to be some sort of language learning site.
On why they did it:
And just for the hell of it, here’s “Stonehenge” live from Wembley in 2009:
Nigel Tufnel Day may have passed, but the Spinal Tap madness continues!
National Geographic did an interview with him regarding the origins of Stonehenge. He turns out to have many fascinating insights as to how it was actually built, some involving dinosaur spit.
I hope you’re celebrating both Veterans Day and Nigel Tufnel Day (11/11/11) today. Tonight I will be celebrating by viewing the historical documents.
It was slightly difficult to find an embeddable version:
And now the obligatory video of “Stonehenge”:
Warning: Deceased Equine Flogging Next 500 Words
So: A little while back College Humor put up a list of the top 100 movie comedies of all times based on the votes of their readers. (If you want to avoid giving these idiots click traffic (and you should), this Fark thread helpfully offers up the entire list in the fourth post.) Based on the evidence, their readers are all either people who have consisted on a diet of nothing but chips of lead-based paint for several years, or under the age of 18. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a credible choice for number one, but not only is that about the only thing they got right, it’s almost the oldest movie they have on the list; both Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles came out a year earlier. (Man, what a year Mel Brooks had! It’s pretty much been a long, slow slide ever since…) That’s right: The oldest film on the list is from 1974.
No Eeling comedies. No classic screwball comedies. No Marx Brothers. No Charlie Chaplin. No Buster Keaton. No Harold Lloyd.
However, even in the woefully inadequate time period covered, the Super-geniuses at College Humor managed to leave off This is Spinal Tap, but managed to make room for Jackass, Jackass 2, Black Sheep (a film that comes in at a robust 28% at Rotten Tomatoes) and (at number 11) Spaceballs.
I think this may in fact be the worst “Best of” movies list ever submitted to the public at large. Perhaps College Humor should rebrand themselves as “Middle School Humor”…