THE DINOSAUR AND THE MISSING LINK - "A Prehistoric Tragedy" (1915)

Tonight's Wild and Wooly Wednesday feature is known as the earliest stop-motion animation film ever made, and the first film made by one major quadruple F'er, as in "Founding Father of Fun Films, Mr. Willis H. O'Brien, or the guy mostly known for his groundbreaking work in "King Kong" and "Mighty Joe Young."

"The Dinosaur and The Missing Link" is silent and only five minutes long, so they had to keep the story moving. It was obviously also meant to be a comedy!

Miss Araminta Rockface, what a lovely name, kind of like Wilma Flintstone.

What a grand country home the Rockface family has.

 There's no mention of a Mrs. Rockface.

Araminta has a couple of suitors, The Duke, and Stonejaw Steve!

There's also another rather unassuming young man named Theophilus Ivoryhead, who would like to get into Araminta's animal skins.

"Unfortunately not yet been discovered"...........seems like we're still having that problem today!

Here's Mr. Tough Guy, the Missing Link!

An alternate title is "The Dinosaur and the Baboon!"

The Missing Link's name is Wild Willie!

Wild Willie ain't too bright, and as you can barely see, the snake that Wild Willie has found is actually a Dinosaur's tail.

The Dinosaur does not appreciate Wild Willie messing around with his rear end, and flattens him right out!

Theophilus Ivoryhead comes along at just the right time before everybody else, and it looks like he has killed the mean Missing Link, and he doesn't mind taking credit for it at all.

The film ends there, but I'm sure that Theophilus and Araminta lived together happily ever after.

THE OUTER LIMITS / "The Mice" Season 1 Episode 15 - 1964

In today's story, an advanced civilization contacts the US to test both worlds' experimental teleportation systems, by exchanging a pair of citizens. Fearing the matter transport will fail, the military selects a prisoner serving a life sentence to be sent to the planet Chromos, 10 light years away from Earth. What could possibly go wrong?..

This one stars Henry Silva, Diana Sands, Michael Higgins, Ron Foster and Dabney Coleman. Henry Silva took drama classes at age 13, in 1955 he auditioned for the Actors Studio and was one of five students chosen out of more than 2500! Diana (A RAISIN IN THE SUN) Sands died at age 39. And, Dabney Coleman is still up and at 'em!

Well, here are the three prisoners brought before officials heading up the teleportation project. After being informed of what was required of them, only Chino, on the right, volunteers for the assignment after the two others decline the offer which includes possible freedom from prison.

Chino is moody and toys with the doctors a bit, it's a weird situation to be in. When the first exchange takes place of the creature from Chromos, he can think of nothing but escaping.

Well, the thing gets teleported to Earth okay but it spazzes out like a Curly, crashing into everything, knocking stuff over and more. It eventually escapes into the woods after getting through the door. It's tougher than it looks!

Chino sees his chance to escape during the commotion and ducks out of the lab. Unfortunately, he runs into a room and tries to jump out a window that has a force field and he gets knocked out cold.

Dr. Richardson is out at the pond in his spiffy 1963 Mercury Comet. He's there to destroy some weird growths he found the creature hiding in the water. And wouldn't you know it, the creepy old Chromoid darts in and kills the doc!

Then, Dr. Harrison sees the monster at the pond, eating slime it pulls out of the water...

It chases her back to the lab and she barely escapes its grasp...

In another room, Chino is set to teleport, but, something's amiss and the exchange fails. Chino faints and is put in a hospital bed to recover.

The creature goes into the lab and starts setting all the dials, preparing for an exchange back to Chromo would be my guess. Chino and the policeman watching him go to the lab to see what all the noise is about...

The thing knocks out the cop and then tosses Chino across the room, into the wall. The Chromoid then places the cop in the transfer location and sends him to Chromo!

Chino gets a gun and the monster attacks him! It's a battle to the death, but Chino holds the thing at bay with the pistol until more policemen arrive.

Dr. Kellander, head of the project, talks to the leader of the Chromoids and tells it that they were lying about their real purpose for the exchange. He says that they only needed to ask for help with their problems on Chromo, Earth would have gladly helped out, instead, they deceived the Earthlings and so the project failed. Yep, it's one of those kinds of endings, you should'a just asked...

And, it looks good for Chino to be released from prison, a free man!.. Check in again on Wednesday for more cool junk from The Dungeon!!..

MUSICAL MUTINY - "Iron Butterfly, Fantasy, The Grit" (1970)

I've got a Psychedelic Saturday Night Special for you that you can thank Tom Moody for. It was Tom's comment that he left on "Pagan Island" that clued me into this happening little flick from 1970 called "Musical Mutiny." "Musical Mutiny" was another one of  Bakersfiel Barry Mahon's wonderful ideas, and is really not much more than a long musical video with a tiny lame story to try and tie it all together, but it's not what it's about, it's who it's about!

 

The star of the show is the Southern California classic psychedelic band call Iron Butterfly. Why they insist on calling them 'The' Iron Butterfly is anybody's guess!

One of the other acts in the movie are a fairly interesting band called Fantasy that was from Florida, and had kind of a Big Brother and the Holding Company thing going on.

 According to the Prog Archives website,

"the band was fronted by a Billy Robbins, and one day, he went missing, and eventually was found dead." Billy Robbins was replaced by a 16 year old Jamene Miller that you will see in the movie. Jamene died in 2008 at the age of 55.

As far as I can tell, Fantasy only put out this one album, and you can get a copy on Discogs for about $13.00 including postage!

It's pretty hard to find out anything about The New Society Band these days, but it looks like at least one member still performs as Rockin' Ron and the New Society Band today.

Likewise about the band called The Grit who perform their song on a merry go round!

Leave it to Barry to come up with "A Fabulous Musical Smogasboard" like this.

(For the record, the proper spelling of the word is Smörgasbord.) Maybe Barry thought it was a cross between a musical buffet and a surfboard!

Nothing worse than a bunch of bored hippies!

"It's a "Musical Mutiny!"

And it's all happening at "Pirate's World" in Dania, Florida!

 This is about the weirdest ride I've ever seen!

A Horseacoaster I guess!

This is what passed for entertainment before rock and roll came along.

The few minutes of a story line will make you wish Barry had picked out another song for somebody to perform, or found another group!

"Pirate's World" was a 100 acre amusement park that opened in 1967, and everybody thought it was pretty cool until Walt Disney World opened in 1971. After that they declared bankruptcy in 1973, and were completely out of business by 1975.

Here's another shot of The New Society Band.

 Here's a pretty good shot of lead singer Doug Ingle of Iron Butterfly!

You can watch just their performance of "Soul Experience" which is one of my favourite songs on the always amazing Internet Archive!

"Musical Mutiny" is only 74 minutes long, and the last seventeen minutes and five seconds is Iron Butterfly doing the full version of  "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida."

Hit It!

 This crowd could have just as easily been at a Sea World show!

So, thanks Tom, and for the rest of you, the best part is that this whole movie streams on YouTube for absolutely nothing, so stay home and watch it! You might feel better about the world for a couple of minutes!!