Cynical Cinema

“I shook up the world!  I shook up the world!” 

When I was younger, I figured that there were certain titles everyone wanted.  Super-Bowl winning quarterback.  Olympic 100-metre champion.  Tour De France winner.  World Series MVP.  But the one title I figured was prized above all others was Heavyweight Champion Of The World.  That was the pinnacle of human athletic achievement, it seemed to me.  If you are Heavyweight Champion Of The World, it means that you can beat up every single other human being on the planet.  And that’s a pretty impressive thing.  I also figured it meant that you could get laid wherever you went.  (Unfortunately, Mike Tyson came to actually believe that, and the world was much the worse for it.)  I remember hearing tales of the invincible Tyson, before I was old enough to start paying attention to boxing.  Once I was old enough, I can remember getting excited for a night out with the boys watching Evander Holyfield fight Riddick Bowe.  Again.

I knew the names of the title holders, the top heavyweight contenders, and the welterweight champs.  The middleweights and the Olympic champs and all the Canadians and even the lightweights.  And I was just a casual fight fan.  Really, I was much more of a football guy.  And a hockey and baseball guy.  Boxing ranked way down the list for me.  And yet there was nothing quite like getting together with the boys for a Big Heavyweight Event.  It was the next best thing to the Super Bowl or the Grey Cup. 

Halfway through watching Ringside Ali, out now on DVD from Alliance Films, I realized something.  I have no idea who is the heavyweight champion of the world right now.  I have no idea who it was a week ago, a month ago, a year ago.  Even five years ago.  The last heavyweight champion I really remember watching is Lennox Lewis.  It’s not that I have stopped caring about boxing.  I still love watching a good boxing match.  But I don’t know when they are on.  I don’t know any of the fighters.  And even if I DID know who they were, and when they were fighting, I wouldn’t be spending fifty bucks to watch it on pay-per-view.  For that kind of money, I can go watch a hockey game.  Live. 

So it is with fondness that I look back on those carefree days of my youth, watching people punch other people until they bled and fell over, and watching crazy dudes bite the ears off slightly less crazy dudes.  And I wondered why I no longer felt the same way.  Then I realized.  My enthusiasm for professional boxing has not faded, it is boxing itself that has faded.  And it hasn’t been just in the last ten years, it has been happening ever since the days of Muhammad Ali.  His era, and his personality, and the aura he projected, was the absolute peak of a sport that had been a magical part of American life throughout this past century.  And where we are now, I certainly hope, is the nadir.

I am more interested in watching a panel of old guys dissect the fights of Joe Louis than I am in watching a heavyweight title fight right now.  I would rather watch grainy, out-of-focus footage of Max Baer fighting Max Schmeling in 1933 than go to wikipedia to find out who today’s heavyweight champion actually is.  And I would rather watch the Thrilla In Manila, thirty times over, than watch one more second of a family-friendly comedy starring Ice Cube.  In fact, I would rather watch the Thrilla in Manila at home on my big TV than attend my own wedding.  That fight was sensational!

But so too are the other fourteen fights on Ringside Ali.  This is one of the most complete sports DVD box sets I have ever seen.  Fifteen fights in total, many of them shown in their entirety.  Some of the all-time greats, the ones we all know about - the Rumble In The Jungle against George Foreman.  The Thrilla In Manila against Joe Frazier.  And of course his two memorable fights with Sonny Liston, the first one giving Ali the title of Heavyweight Champion of the World, and the second one, which gave the world that memorable photo of the Greatest standing over a prone Liston, screaming at him to get up and fight.

ESPN has provided an all-star panel to discuss these old fights, giving insight between matches and putting the fights in their historical context.  The first panel is made up of Brian Kenny, the ESPN sportscaster, Bert Randolph Sugar, a famous boxing journalist and writer, and George Chuvalo, the Canadian heavyweight who fought two memorable bouts against Muhammad Ali in 1966 and 1972.  These are the guys who discuss the first few fights on the set.  Chuvalo is invaluable, because usually he has fought each of these guys himself.  And he is very familiar with even those he never personally fought.

The first fight in the set is one against a man named Doug Jones, a fight that would set up the winner as the top-ranked challenger for the heavyweight title.  Jones was ranked #3, and Ali (then Cassius Clay) was ranked #2.  Clay won a unanimous decision in a very close fight, which was a little controversial at the time (Jones was the fan favourite, and he fared perhaps better than the cards indicated).  Sugar provides the great insight into this matchup, since he was there, at ringside, writing about it.  The victory set Clay up for a title fight, but he had to go through one more fight first.

That fight was against a Brit named Henry Cooper, and I think it sums up Ali’s attitude and career about as well as any other fight could.  Clay was famous in those days for predicting the round in which he would knock out his opponent.  Against Cooper, he had predicted the fifth round.  By the beginning of the third, he had Cooper reeling.  He was bleeding from over one eye, he was unsteady on his feet, and Clay could easily have gone in for the kill.  But he had predicted the fifth, not the third.  So he got totally cocky, and danced around him.  He teased Cooper, obviously not going after him, trying to keep him around until the fifth.  This allowed Cooper to catch his breath some between the third and fourth, and in the fourth round, he absolutely hammers Clay with a shot out of nowhere.  Totally stunned, having almost lost the fight right there, Ali buckles down and beats Cooper until the fight is stopped in the fifth - as he had predicted.

Then comes Sonny Liston.  The panel does a great job of hyping the Liston fight.  It’s important to put this fight in historical context - much like George Foreman after him, Joe Louis before him, and Mike Tyson most recently, Liston was the heavyweight champion of the world, and he was considered invincible.  A force of nature who could, and would, knock out any man who stepped into the ring, and fast.  Cassius Clay wasn’t given a chance.  What followed was truly one of the most bizarre episodes in boxing history.  Before the fight, Clay was showing up on Liston’s lawn.  Inside Liston’s house.  Calling him out.  The most feared man in the world, and here’s this kid coming to his house to call him on.

But as far as most people were concerned, it wouldn’t matter.  Liston would pulverize this brash, cocky little kid.  Then, in the fourth round, Liston realized that it wouldn’t be that easy.  Through four rounds, he hadn’t even been able to touch Clay, let alone hit him square.  So Liston’s trainer put some kind of substance on his gloves, something that he rubbed into Clay’s eyes throughout the fifth round.  And it blinded him.  Cassius Clay fought a full round of boxing against one of the most powerful, feared men in history - blind.  And when he made it through that round, not only alive but still on his feet, and still untouched.  And then between the sixth and seventh, Liston threw in the towel.

No one seems to really know why, to this day.  There has been a ton of speculation (and of course our intrepid panel in this box set has a fair amount of their own), but it doesn’t appear that anyone really knows why Liston quit.  After the fight, Clay (who then changed his name to Muhammad Ali) suggests a reason - he had predicted the eighth round.  “I had him gone in eight.  I was gettin’ ready to take him in the eighth as you can see.  But the man stopped it, just to keep from makin’ me look so great.”  It’s kind of hard to argue with Muhammad Ali.  He was just larger-than life.  As he said, or rather yelled, immediately following the fight, he did indeed shake up the world.

More fights follow - the next one is the second (and maybe even more memorable) Ali-Liston fight.  The one where Liston didn’t wait until the seventh to quit, but instead quit at the two minute and twelve second mark of the first round.  He went down, hit by a punch that was not exactly a haymaker, and then refused to get up.  The panel here has different interpretations of this fight, and different opinions about exactly how hard Liston had been hit and how hurt he really was.  I think this fight is memorable more for the photo, the one of Ali standing over the fallen Liston, screaming at him to “get up and fight!”

Then there are a bunch of other fights - the first Chuvalo fight, with commentary by Chuvalo himself.  (Chuvalo seems to still believe, in a small way, that he could have won that fight.)  Chuvalo was never knocked down in his entire career, and Ali later said he was the toughest man he ever fought.  Former champ Larry Holmes joins the panel to talk about a fight with Karl Mildenberger, a European champ who put in a surprisingly good effort against The Greatest.  Ali and Howard Cosell, in some old file footage, provide the live commentary over his fight with Ernie Terrell.  Ali, who taunted Terrell throughout that fight, makes a public apology for “using the ring for talkin’ instead of fightin’”.

Cosell and Ali have some more verbal sparring to do before a fight with Zora Foley, which is followed by Jerry Quarry, a fight that sees Bill Cosby in the broadcast booth.  And not with today’s panel, but the 1967 panel for the bout.  Then Oscar Bonavena, then the Fight Of The Century.  Ali’s first fight (of three) against Joe Frazier.

I had a substantial luxury in watching this stuff.  You see, I didn’t actually know who had won all of these fights.  I knew Ali had lost some, somewhere along the line.  I just didn’t know when, or to whom.  All I knew was that he had beaten George Foreman in the Rumble In The Jungle, and I know that only because I am an enormous fan of When We Were Kings, the brilliant documentary about that unbelievable event.

So I watched the Joe Frazier fights with the enthusiasm people must have had when they first saw them.  And the third one, the Thrilla In Manila, might actually be the greatest boxing match I have ever watched.  Ever.  I won’t say who won any of these fights, because I hope that some people might pick up this DVD set and watch it with the same blank slate and unbridled enthusiasm I felt.  There are other worthwhile fights too - the Rumble in the Jungle is included in here, as well as a fight against Chuck Wepner (the fight which inspired the movie Rocky). 

Then Ali fights Ron Lyle, and the disc closes out with the Thrilla In Manila, which I will say again, is the best fight I have ever seen.  Those three Ali-Frazier fights are three of the greatest fights in history, and nothing came close until Holyfield and Bowe had those epic battles in the 90s.  At the end of the fight, Eddie Futch whispered in Frazier’s ear “Joe, nobody will forget what you did here tonight”.  And they won’t, as long as DVDs like Ringside Ali preserve that moment, and so many others, for us to watch.  Ringside Ali is a must for even the most casual boxing fans.

One last note - this is how amazing the Thrilla In Manila was.  My girlfriend came home when I was partly through round two.  It was ten to four, and Oprah was about to begin.  She said “you’d better put it on pause when Oprah comes on, she showing her favourite things today”.  When 4:00 rolled around, I said “you want me to flip it over to Oprah?”  And she said “hello, no.  Oprah can wait.  I’ve got to see who wins this fight!”

Last year, at about this time, Alliance Films released a box set called the Original Christmas Classics. It contained Christmas shows and movies with which we are all, I’m sure, familiar. The claymation stuff - Rudolph, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, the Frosty movies. It was a really nice nostalgic set. This year, Alliance is releasing The New Christmas Classics on a similar box set on November 4th. This time, the content of the box is decidedly less familiar. George of the Jungle, Casper The Friendly Ghost, Gumby, and Fat Albert are not generally thought of as Christmas Classics. At least, not that I’m aware.

The first series in the box is Gumby. This is the first time I have ever seen Gumby, a show from the 1960s about a weird little dude made out of clay with a pointy head who travels into books with his weird little clay horse friend. In this manner, the two manage to travel through history, observing the events as they take place and in some cases affecting the outcome. The books they enter are sometimes classics, like A Christmas Carol, and other times they are books that have never existed. Like The Big Snow Hill. The first episode appears to have nothing to do with Christmas at all, it is about Thanksgiving and the Mayflower. The second episode sees the pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock. This episode features some 1960s-style questionable history and attitudes toward Indians, and the theft of a bunch of corn.

Then there are episodes with no dialogue, that just see Gumby running around and falling into toasters and cement mixers and then putting himself back together. He and Pokey the horse visit fairy tales involving poor kings and princes and the goose that lays the golden eggs. There is an episode called In a Fix that involves a bunch of strange bird-like clay creatures that hop around. It is a genuinely bizarre collection of Gumby episodes, and of the 12 that are featured on this set, only three are even tangentially related to Christmas. The main theme of the Christmas episodes is Ebeneezer Scrooge, who keeps escaping from A Christmas Carol to wreak havoc on Christmas. Apparently the Grinch wasn’t yet the anti-Christmas villain yet in 1967, so Scrooge became the bad guy. He keeps trying to kidnap Santa, or at the very least discredit him. In one particularly memorable episode, Scrooge uses the word “humbug” as a verb, a noun, a preposition, an adverb, an adjective, and an epithet. Sometimes within the same sentence. Another great one involves a couple of little clay building blocks who drive a tank that shoots lasers. And then there are nine other bizarre episodes of Gumby that may appeal to stoners in some way.

The next series in the set is Fat Albert. And because every single cartoon, ever, does a Christmas episode that rips off A Christmas Carol, this one is no exception. The boys are trying to put together a Christmas pageant at their clubhouse, a shack in the junkyard. The mean old Scroogey owner of the junkyard wants to bulldoze the shack, and hates the kids, and is miserly with money, and is generally a nuisance. A young couple with no job and no money end up in the shack to have their new baby, because there is nowhere else for them to go. There is a Tiny Tim character named Marshall, the son of the downtrodden couple, and there are some standard Fat Albert style cheesy lines. “You remind me of school at vacation time - no class!” Of course, in the end, the old Scrooge sees the error of his ways, and all is mended. There are two other Fat Albert episodes on the DVD, neither of which has anything to do with Christmas. One is about a girl who is embarrassed about her poverty and her rundown house, and the other is about Fat Albert’s friends helping him with his chores so he can go to the zoo and feed an elephant.

Then there is George of the Jungle. This show is reasonably funny, for a kids’ cartoon, and the six episodes here are pretty good. But again, only two of them have anything to do with Christmas. Again, we get the Christmas Carol cartoon cop-out, as George is visited by three goats. Get it? Goats? The Goat of Christmas Presents? You see, he has tried to make Christmas happen for some irritating city girl who lives in the jungle. Not being familiar with Christmas, he gets overwhelmed by the Christmas spirit, and makes every day a Christmas celebration, much to the chagrin of his friends. He is visited by three ghosts. Three ghost goats. Who show him the error of his ways, blah blah blah, and everything turns out fine.

The other George of the Jungle episodes involve a crazy rash George can’t scratch, and a weird baboon who hogs George’s heroism for himself. Although he calls himself a marmoset, he’s clearly a mandril. He has the coloured nose and all. There’s one about a magical bathroom that gets stolen, and all the apes begin disappearing from the jungle. And then there is the George’s Birthday Present episode where George has his first birthday ever. A premise which is virtually identical to the one in the episode where he tries to provide Ursula, the annoying city girl, with her Christmas.

And that brings us to the final series in the box set, Casper. Not the TV series, but a made-for-TV movie called Casper’s Haunted Christmas. This is an 80-minute movie with the computer-generated Casper and his computer-generated uncles taking up residence in Kriss, Massachusetts. Get it? Kriss, Mass? Anyway, after a Randy Travis theme song and the appearance of a ghost who is clearly Slimer from Ghostbusters, we get into the movie. Apparently, some giant green ghost god will revoke the ghost licenses of the uncles if Casper doesn’t scare someone by Christmas. You see, ghosts have to scare people, and blah blah blah. At the very least, in this movie they make the point - Casper does, indeed, scare people all the time when they discover he’s a ghost. But in this case, it is scaring people on purpose that matters. He has until Christmas to do so, or the four of them will be banished to some dark-space purgatory for eternity.

This set-up takes about seven minutes. Which means that the next 73 minutes need to be filled with something. And that something is cheesy, awful jokes. Like the kind I used to see on Hallowe’en cards when we were forced to exchange them with our classmates in the second grade. See if these phrases make you laugh - smellular phone! Shocking days until Christmas! No? Yeah, me either. There is an incredibly painful few minutes of dialogue about “scare mail”, the “ghost office”, and the dead letter department. Basically, it is the same show that Casper used to be when it was a cartoon, years ago, only much worse. And with slightly better animation.

Overall, with a total of 22 episodes of various series in this box set, only 7 of them actually have anything to do with Christmas. Of the seven Christmas episodes, five of them are takes on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. If you count the Casper movie, six of the seven involve three ghosts. And very few are worthwhile. But the box set could, conceivably, keep your kids entertained from December 1st all the way until Christmas.

Alliance Films is releasing Fat Albert’s Hallowe’en Special on Tuesday, September 30th. That gives you a full month to load up on Hallowe’en-themed cartoon series like Casper and Fat Albert. Like I said about Casper, I’m not entirely sure how many people are going to leap to the store to purchase Fat Albert’s Hallowe’en Special simply because it’s being offered around Hallowe’en time. It strikes me that it may well be a better idea to get a bunch of scary movies and go from there.

However, if you have small children who are not yet of an age where a family viewing of Texas Chainsaw Massacre is appropriate, perhaps this is the ideal product. Fat Albert’s Hallowe’en Special really does work for children. Bill Cosby managed to give this show a certain amount of charm even in the most bland episodes. The Hallowe’en Special comes with two bonus episodes, introduced by a very young Cosby himself, and they are better than the Hallowe’en one. One is about a prankster who gets his comeuppance, and one is about the silliness of superstitions. Just the kind of stuff that educates kids while entertaining them. If, you know, you’re kids appreciate Bill Cosby’s sense of humour.