Dec. 8th, 2016

mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (Potter - sit down)
I did a quiz! Online quizzes seem like an artifact of the old Livejournal days, to me. This one is about "secondary" Harry Potter characters - apparently everybody other than Harry, Ron, Herminone, Voldemort and Dumbledore are secondary, in somebody-or-other's opinion (even Snape!) - but anyway, this thing has something like 84 questions and I got 94%. I couldn't remember which one was Crabbe and which one was Goyle, and the rest of them I missed were pretty much the really minor characters, the ones that stayed in the background, mostly some of the most minor adults. (I've read the books more times than I've seen the movies, so it's putting the faces with the names that I tripped up on. The spelling of the names is not a problem for me.)

Anyway, that reminded me that I meant to come back and talk about Fantastic Beasts and How to Find Them, because I don't think I said anything about it other than that we'd been twice and that (obviously) we liked it. I'll try not to be spoilery, because the main thing I wanted to say was that if you haven't seen it you really ought to. I read somewhere that while its first weekend wasn't spectacular, it's holding on really well and it's going to end up making more money than they first thought - it has "good legs" as they say. And that tells you that the word of mouth is good. I guess the #1 thing that I liked about it were the CGI animals, because they are gorgeous, but the rest of it is awfully good too. I have never been a huge fan of Eddie Redmayne's, but he is really good in this as well, as is, well, everybody else. Other than Redmayne and Colin Farrell and the (cough) surprise guest (which I won't spoil) at the end - and, well, Jon Voight, but that's also practically a cameo - mostly this is a cast of relative unknowns. They're people who have been around, yes, but aren't really super-famous. -- Anyway, everything else I can think of to say seems to veer into spoiler territory, and to avoid that, I better just stop here.

Regarding the title of this entry, the "Wizarding World" thing seems to be what they're pushing as an overall name for the two series, since "Harry Potter" doesn't exactly work any more. (Before this I had only heard it as the name of that theme-park thing in Orlando.)


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mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (fireworks)
I have another four Music Advent videos to show you, so yay, I don't have to stop and consider what to write about next. (See here for the explanation of this year's "connections" theme.)

So where I stopped in the entry linked above was with "Wicked Game." And it wasn't a stretch from there to think "Wicked Witch" but using Wicked the Musical seemed like an uninteresting choice, and the Wicked Witch in the old movie doesn't sing. So the other thing that occurred to me was "The Wiz" which I'm not really familiar with at all. I looked it up and the Wicked Witch there is named Evillene and she does indeed have a song - apparently only the one, near as I could figure out. I knew (or well, I was prodded by the internet to remember, anyway) that Mary J. Blige did this role in the recent "Live" TV version, but again, that seemed like an obvious/less interesting choice. I hunted around and found this rather amazing version from the old Wiz movie. This is Mabel King, who apparently also did this same role in the original Broadway production. I love that costume, for one thing - how many crowns is she wearing? about five? - but also, going from the lead-in to the number, this full-on gospel-style number is just not what I expected. It's pretty awesome, and now I may have to (finally, after all this time) go back and watch the whole movie and find out if there are more gems like this there.


As I said, I planned out the first few days and after that I realized that this is not really all that hard, coming up with connections, and I could just wing it. The next day, I started poking around in the Wikipedia article about The Wiz, and what I found that I eventually used was that Mabel King was the Wicked Witch and Lena Horne was the Good Witch. So I decided to do a Lena Horne song, and pretty much the first thing I found was "Stormy Weather" (which I think may be from a 40s movie of the same name) which seemed thematically appropriate as well. Heck, the way the wind is blowing in the background for most of that song, it looks like there's gonna be another twister any time. Also, if you're interested in such things, be sure to stick around for the ballet number (!) that follows the song.


So then, the next night, I came home and read the Wikipedia article on Lena Horne for inspiration. I found connections to both Harry Belafonte and Tony Bennett, among others I could have used, but I also found that Janet Jackson was once cast as Lena in a biopic before Nipplegate put a stop to that. And I wasn't really wanting to stay with these really old songs that badly, so I went with Janet. I picked this one, just because I like it:


And then we come to this last night. I was driving home in the car thinking about this, and I went, well, if we're avoiding the obvious, the really obvious thing here would be to jump to Michael or the Jackson Five or something like that. And from there I thought, well, how about a different Jackson? Like Joe! And then "Steppin' Out" immediately started playing in my head, but I really never liked that song that much. I did really like Joe Jackson at some point, I remembered, though, and I knew there had to be some more songs to choose from even if I couldn't remember exactly what they were, at that exact moment. And luckily I was almost home by that point and didn't forget my new inspiration before I got there. So instead of that song I don't like (which I wouldn't have used, anyway - I would have gone to Janet's Wikipedia entry for more inspiration, rather than that), we have this, which is a live version from the Jools Holland show in 2003:

(From his reaction, this must be a much more enthusiastic response of "WHERE?" than he was accustomed to - he nearly cracks up both times.)

And I have no idea what I'm doing next. you'll have to check my Tweets (or the tag) or wait another four days to find out!

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