The "Bang! Zoom!" may have included Ralph Kramden samples from The Honeymooners at one time, but I'm not sure they would have been allowed to stay in the pressings.
It was a funky shuffle groove, with the MVP being a cheesy, sour, off-key horn-hit sample, a dissonant chord blowing a nice breath of fresh air compared to the in vogue (and overused) "orchestra hit" samples of the day.
In this extremely surrealistic adaptation of everyone's favorite drug induced children's tale Jan Svankmajer creates a world of make-believe that could terrify children and most adults into madness. Using a mixture of live action and stop-motion animation he flings Alice into a dingy place full of taxidermied creatures, shattered pottery, rusty drafting tools, and lots of sawdust.
Most of the characters from the book are present but in very unexpected forms. The white rabbit takes the form of a real taxidermied rabbit, the Mad Hatter is a decaying marionette, and the caterpillar is a sock with dentures and giant glass eyes which it sews shut when it sleeps.
Adding to the nightmarish atmosphere of the film, the soundtrack consists of long silences broken up by the louder than life sounds of ratchets, grating metal, and splintering wood. These sounds are intensified by the lack of any kind of musical score.
This is truly one of the best versions of this story that I've ever witnessed.
There are various rumors surrounding Alice. It is rumored that it was nicknamed after a girl named Alice who was the ex-girlfriend of a student who was portraying St. Pat during the various ceremonies one year. For you see it is also rumored that Alice for many years was made of some of the most vile things you could think of, garbage, puke, rancid food, roadkill, etc. Basically the most disgusting things the St. Patrick's Board could find and get away with using. In the last few years of it's existence Alice was made by a faculty member who was a chemical engineer and while it still looked disgusting was said to be harmless.
Why is Alice no more? Well you can imagine with the crap that was in this tank not many student knights wanted to be submerged in it. It was the duty of the St. Patrick's Board to grab them and toss them in. This occassionally broke out into fights, but this was tolerated because of the long tradition of the ceremony. A few years ago a student knight broke a leg and some other people got beat pretty good. So the University finally decided to put an end to it.
Just one of the many crazy wacky events that surround the celebration of St. Patrick's Day in Rolla, Mo.
The ALICE (All-Purpose LIghtweight Carrying Equipment) pack is a military backpack used for transporting supplies.
ALICE packs have many compartments for storing a variety of supplies, such as maps, a sleeping bag, clothes, a tent, a small shovel, Medical Supplies, Food, Extra food, a canteen, and a weapons cleaning kit.
The ALICE pack is, despite its name, notoriously heavy.
"No one puts flowers on a flower's grave." "Adult songs for children, or children's songs for adults," is how Tom Waits describes Alice. "A maelstrom or fever-dream; a tone poem with torch songs and waltzes... an odyssey in dream logic and nonsense."
"Songs are joining the dream of the listener, and completing a circuit that is really entirely your own," said Waits.
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