jim henson

Singer-trumpeter-band leader-lounge king Louis Prima had several distinct career arcs during his long career.

When this 45 was released in 1965, Prima's downward slope from the pinnacle of his Vegas years had begun, though it's doubtful that you could have told him that at the time.

In '63, he'd married singer Gia Maione, his fifth wife, who'd joined his band the year before, following the departure of Keely Smith, his previous wife and singing partner.

In '64, as he and Maione were starting a family together, Louis founded his own independent recording label, Prima Records.

This 45, capitalizing on the recent success of Disney's film, 'Mary Poppins' was released on the Prima label, but a deal was struck to release the LP 'Let's Fly With Mary Poppins' (recorded with Maione and Prima's backing band, Sam Butera and the Witnesses) on Disney's Buena Vista record label.

Likely that relationship forged with Disney had something to do with their approaching Prima in 1966 to lend his vocal and musical talents to their next upcoming animated feature,
'The Jungle Book'.









Listen to:
Louis Prima - A Spoonful of Sugar
(Prima Records 45, 1965)
(click for audio)














Listen to:
Louis Prima - Stay Awake
(Prima Records 45, 1965)
(click for audio)



See also:
For other Louis Prima 'Mary Poppins' tracks, click over to Covering The Mouse and JeansMusicBlog.

(Reposted from 'Brief Window')

As much as I feel slightly ashamed of having lived this long without actress / singer
Virginia O'Brien on my radar, it's a genuine treat to be discovering her now and finding myself a brand-new 'retro crush'.

(Evidently, I'm not the first to have been affected by the late Ms. O'Brien this way.)

Recently I watched the 1943 film 'DuBarry Was a Lady', a very silly and garishly Technicolor musical comedy, very loosely adapted from the successful and ribald stage success - - except with most of the Cole Porter songs removed (along with the bawdiness), and the original cast replaced with stars Red Skelton, Lucille Ball and Gene Kelly.

I'd sought it out primarily to see a young Zero Mostel in his first screen role, some twenty-five years prior to 'The Producers', and roughly ten years before he was blacklisted in Hollywood.

Zero's screen time as Gene Kelly's buddy, a crummy nightclub mentalist, is brief but wonderful.

I found that the garish color palette in the movie (Lucille Ball's first appearance as a redhead!) mixed well with the crazy lavish wardrobe, and the general and obvious 'half-assery' on the part of MGM studios' scuttling of the original play inadvertently contributed to it being successful as a a film that's great fun despite its many weaknesses.

I also enjoyed the appearances by Tommy Dorsey and his band (including catching glimpses of trumpeter Ziggy Elman and a very young Buddy Rich on drums), but the real surprise of 'DuBarry' was Virginia O'Brien, whose curious trademark 'deadpan' delivery lights up the screen the few times she appears in the film.

Virginia O'Brien (1919 - 2001) appeared in several MGM musicals made during the 1940's, having come from a stage background.

Her 'frozen face' deadpan schtick (which she didn't always use) reportedly had its origins in the late '30s, when a case of stagefright paralyzed her delivery during a musical number, which unexpectedly delighted the audience.

Her typical formula of impassively 'swinging' the vocals of a song strikes me as sort of a bizarro version of the explosive tendencies singer Betty Hutton used as a gimmick around the same period.

(Perhaps no coincidence that in the 1942 film version of 'Panama Hattie', O'Brien plays the role that Hutton had played two years prior in the Broadway stage production.)

- In the video clip below, ▼ Rags Ragland watches from the sidelines while Virginia O'Brien performs 'Salome' in a sequence from 'DuBarry Was a Lady'.

(NOTE: Beware of pop-ups when playing this video!)



By 1943, when 'DuBarry' was released, O'Brien had recently married stage and screen actor Kirk Alyn, an old friend of her co-star, Red Skelton. By the end of the '40s, Alyn would be the first actor to portray Superman onscreen, the role for which he is best remembered.

- You can read more about the life and career of Virginia O'Brien at Classic Images, and in her listing at The Internet Movie Database.

-YouTube has a few more
Virginia O'Brien video clips, including her jazzed-up version of 'Rock-A-Bye Baby', from the middle of a long musical sequence in The Marx Brothers' movie 'The Big Store', from 1941.

Pearls. An ascot.
Striped trousers and floral prints.

Lounging on the free-standing column spiral staircase and sipping Pepsi out of the bottle.

Good times...

(click on image to ENLARGE in a new window)



ADDENDUM, 11.10.08: A commenter on this post ventured a guess that perhaps the artist responsible for this ad may have been Austin Briggs, who'd worked in a similar style and had done ads for Pepsi around the same time.

I can certainly see similarities, but I see some marked differences, too.

Casting about the web, I found that commercial illustration authority Leif Peng has gathered together many such Pepsi ads from the era in a flickr set - - including this one.

As Peng has classified this ad as 'illustrator unknown', I think that's our answer - - for now...

- - Anything to add, anyone?