Tonight, let’s kick things off with a fantastic novelty track from 1932. It’s “It Must Be Swell” by Alex Bartha & His Orchestra. I tried to find a decent picture of Bartha and could not. And I’m not sure how many other recordings we have extant from them, either. Because this one is fantastic. I’m surprised I only recently ran across it.
Before we move onto the feature film, let’s stop with an episode of Lights Out from 1946. This show sprang to mind again because I was, as I normally am, making some crack on Twitter. This one happened to reference the show, so I figured we should spend some time listening to “The Coffin in Studio B.”
Last but not least, we go to 1957 and Voodoo Island. It stars Karloff, but really, I can’t do it better justice than one of its posters:
SEE! Men turned into zombies!
SEE! Woman-eating cobra plants!
SEE! Strange voodoo rituals!
SEE! The bridge of death!
1957 was a different time: you could have sexist cobra plants.