That´s it! Thank you so much! ^^
I didn´t know they continued the series until recently. That´s great!
PS: Horrible visual memory here. He wasn´t bald after all…
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Sucked in ChatGPT, you got it wrong!
–repeatedly gives ChatGPT the finger–
-Wade
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If you couldn’t find the album via google, even with the data suggested by ChatGPT, isn’t it possible that ChatGPT just hallucinated the entire thing?
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It’s entirely possible. I could have been feeding it information only to have it regurgitate my assumptions into something that sounded believable to me. I’ll send the album info over to an old friend (who probably has a copy of the album) and see if ChatGPT was right and report back.
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That’s usually what it means when ChatGPT tells you about something that Google can’t find. Its job is to give you a plausible and helpful sequence of words, and “this is the album you’re thinking of!” followed by a plausible title and track list is more helpful than “I don’t know that album”.
Whether that has any connection to an album that actually exists in the real world or not is entirely irrelevant to ChatGPT. The idea that names refer to actual entities in the world rather than just being sequences of words with certain probabilities is completely incomprehensible to an LLM.
See: the incident when ChatGPT started giving people some unfortunate schmuck’s phone number, saying they could ask questions via text message at that number. It knows that the most helpful response to “do you have a phone number where I can text you?” is a seven-digit number; the concept that those are not just arbitrary seven-digit numbers but actually have meaning is entirely alien to it.
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Anyone here like bigfoot movies?
Alright, it’s a small genre, but a particular one, and we have the author of a bigfoot game @pbparjeter in this topic. In the 1970s, it was a culturally hot enough genre to keep producing entries from the USA every year.
The first bigfoot movie I saw was Night of the Demon (1980) as part of watching the 39 films that were prosecuted during Mary Whitehouse’s Video Nasties moral panic in the UK. This probably isn’t the most representative example because it’s hyper gory and exploitational, but it got me interested.
Anyway, in the past month I watched a found footage minibudget bigfoot film called Shadows of Bigfoot (2024) which worked for me (my IMDB review). And last night I watched an infamous 1974 film called Shriek of the Mutilated. Uh, I don’t know what I can say about that except ‘it’s in the canon’. Its director was killed in a helicopter accident on the Pan Am building in 1977.
I think Exists (2014), another found footage Yeti film, is excellent.
I also enjoy the folksier Creature from Black Lake (1976) from the boom period. Here’s a very nice (modern) trailer cut from the beautiful restored print of the film:
Have you seen any bigfoot films?
-Wade
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We saw Conclave. If you don’t know, it’s about picking a new Pope, which is done by sequestering all the Cardinals and voting in a conclave. And the movie does its best to be a pulpy thriller about this process. The performances are exquisite, and the whole thing is totally unbelievable. I’m not sure how much of its unbelievability is because the pope-picking pomp is really weird anyway (sorry, Catholics), and how much is because it could never really happen. But I enjoyed the movie despite not believing any of it for one second. Except Ralph Fiennes’s performance. That was believable and sad. Some actors can convey worlds just by moving their faces the littlest bit. Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow were no slouches either.
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I actually haven’t seen any Bigfoot feature films that I can think of.
Interestingly, during my research for the game, I found out that some efforts to debunk the Patterson-Gimlin film (ie. the original minute-long Bigfoot video) concern the creators’ choice of film stock combined with the video’s quick creation.
It was filmed on Kodachrome II film stock, and, according to Wikipedia:
A more serious objection concerns the film’s “timeline” … Kodachrome II movie film … could be developed only by a lab containing a $60,000+ machine, and the few West Coast labs known to possess one did not do developing over weekends. Patterson’s brother-in-law Al DeAtley claims not to remember where he took the film for development or where he picked it up
Critics claim that too much happened between the filming (at 1:15 at the earliest) and the filmmakers’ arrival in Willow Creek (at 6:30 at the latest). … The film’s defenders retort that although the time window was tight, it was do-able."
On social media, people who want to debunk Bigfoot movies usually just look at the content, but I guess the really hardcore critics focus on forensics.
Have you seen this interview with Bob Heironimus who claims to have been in the bigfoot suit? Once you see him walking, it’s hard to unsee 
(That’s all before 1 minute 30)
-Wade
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Right. When I saw a trailer for this, I said ‘Doesn’t this already exist?’. My friend established I was thinking of The Young Pope, presumably because most pope media looks the same.
-Wade
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Haha, that’s crazy. Especially the part about being offered $1,000 and not being paid. That’s like $9,000 in today’s money. As soon as I heard $1,000, I thought “that’s way more than you’d offer someone for a minute of recording and not enough to keep them quiet.”
So I guess Heironimus could be Bigfoot. Though I suppose it would be easy to imitate the walk after the fact. It’s possible he’s a grifter taking advantage of the existing hoax (assuming you believe the original film was a hoax).
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"Tis the season and I have a couple of leftovers from last year’s marathon of Christmas Carol renditions and intentions to see how much of the Rankin Bass Christmas Canon I can find audio described, but anyone have other recommendations for Christmas or other wintry celebrations related movies or featurettes to check out?
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The last word of your post (hoax) is a handy segue to the bigfoot film I watched yesterday, Hoax (2019). Which, had I not been in the middle of this bigfoot jag, I probably wouldn’t mention here because it was mostly boring.
I suppose the thing worth mentioning re: this film versus other bigfoot films I’ve seen is that in Hoax, the characters go in with a completely cynical attitude. A nasty TV producer rounds up people to make a bigfoot special. People only join because they are paid lots of money, or they’re the network boss’s bratty daughter looking for a reporting break, or they lost a loved one in the area but never found the body.
I think in all the other films I mentioned, the protagonists are keen or hopeful of finding bigfoot evidence, or at worst, just open to it while being skeptical. As you might expect, the 70s films have the the least cynical characters while later films have more cynical characters.
-Wade
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I just revisited Caligula (1979). Its background is messy beyond belief. It was a megabudgeted production with Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren, and everyone from Peter O Toole to Sir John Gielgud in it, directed by Tinto Brass (who specialised in erotic films) but then beefed up with sex and hardcore by Bob Guccione of Penthouse magazine.
My dad bought a secondhand Australian VHS of this in the 1980s. I’d watched it illicitly. It was ugly and cruel and with a lot of sex, and mostly made me feel poor.
In light of a bunch of restorations and a new cut of the film made from existing footage recently, I watched the now-available Italian cut from 1983. And it was really good! Suddenly it was a good-looking production with a trajectory, a nightmare about mad emperor syndrome, and equal parts erotic and cruel. The subtitles helped direct my attention to the story. Tons of the sex for sex sake I’d previously seen was gone in this version. It’s also clear to me masses of the film was over my head when I last saw this, even as a young adult. It’s still brutal.
This Italian version was already a way better film about this kind of thing than, say, Salo, which remains a critical darling, but which I always feel is not actually any ‘better’ than other films doing similar things which get labelled as exploitation while it doesn’t. Caligula’s not going to get a big reappraisal since it’s got too mixed-up a history. And the new Ultimate Cut (which I will watch) claims to contain not a frame from the original release. The argument being presented against the absence of any of the original editors being involved is that they basically edited the original carelessly as a porn film in the first place, using the first take of anything.
Below: a trailer for The Ultimate Cut. NSFW. Some nudity, sex, gore.
-Wade
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Not sure they really count as movies by most people’s standards since the longest of the ones I’ve watched so far is 50 minutes or so, but so far I’ve listened to descriptive audio of the following Christmas specials this year:
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer(Rankin Bass, 1964)
Frosty the Snowman(Again, Rankin Bass)
A Chipmunk Christmas, which I believe is new to me despite having been a big Chipmunk fan as a kid.
Frosty Returns
Story of Santa Calus, which I had never heard of prior to stumbling upon it searching for descriptive audio of the Rankin Bass Christmas stuff. Yet another in the long list of Santa Claus Origin stories, this one having Nicholas Claus as a toy maker who grew up in an orphanage and pennyless because he keeps giving toys away, and after losing his toy shop, he and his wife get shipwrecked on a trip to deliver toys to the orphanage he grew up in, wash up at the North Pole, where, after saving a young elf’s life, the elves grant his wish to give toys to all the children of the world. Since it’s old enough, I wish I had seen this one back when I had a working eye.
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Frosty the Snowman must be one of the most popular Christmas characters and also one with the least media appearances.
I guess copyright must make him expensive to use. Rudolph is a close second, I guess, though he seems to make cameos in a lot of places.
When I was young, grandma would roll out the film projector and we’d watch some old family movies and marvel at how our parents were once kids too… and then she’d always put on The Little Match Girl (1937) to make us all cry.
The Little Match Girl (1937) - 8:14
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Frosty The Snowman (1969) is one of the best Christmas cartoons, for sure. Jackie Vernon is Frosty, to me. His voice was perfect for the role.
That’s why I have mixed feelings when watching Microwave Massacre (1979) because that was actually Vernon’s normal speaking voice as Frosty. There was no embellishment. Every little quirk and intonation is exactly how he sounds in Microwave Massacre. So you can imagine hearing Frosty getting a taste for human flesh and luring unsuspecting victims to his home.
Thumpety thump thump… 
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Happy Birthday!
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That made me laugh. I haven’t seen Microwave Massacre but I do know what the ugly cover looks like and could sense it lurking behind the spoiler blur.
I’m not ready to cry right now but when I am, I’ll watch The Little Match Girl…
-Wade
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