More than six thousand Christian Armenians from Syria have poured into Armenia in recent months, escaping the civil war back home. The Wall Street Journal‘s Joe Parkinson reports from Yerevan.
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Today’s Trillion Dollar Movie is a dubbed fairy tale from Mexico that goes by two different titles in English, alternately known as Tom Thumb and Little Red Riding Hood or as Little Red Riding Hood And the Monsters. 
One thing’s for certain. You’ve probably never seen a fairy tale this cheesy or this much fun. It was one of three Little Red Riding Hood movies that writer-director Roberto Rodriguez made in the early 1960s at Mexico City’s Churubusco-Azteca Studios, all starring Maria Gracia, nicknamed “La Niña México,” as the fairy tale heroine.
An American producer, Kenneth Gordon Murray, bought the rights to distribute the pictures in the United States. Murray specialized in acquiring fairy tale and fantasy titles from Mexico, Germany and Eastern Europe, making cheap English dubs, and then marketing them for kids stateside. Some of his other titles included Rumpelstiltskin, Santa’s Magic Kingdom and The Golden Goose.
Little Red Riding Hood And the Monsters from 1962 is one of Murray’s weirder and more surreal releases, combining fantasy elements of the original fairy tale with campy slapstick comedy and Gothic horror. Little Red, her friend Tom Thumb and Stinky the Skunk embark on a quest in a haunted forest to defeat the Queen of Badness and her cadre of monsters, including Hurricane, Carrot Head, vampires, robots, witches, a fire-breathing dragon and a two-headed Siamese freak.
One reviewer succinctly captured its charms, “An awful, jaw-droppingly bad ‘kiddie’ movie where the beloved characters of Little Red Riding Hood and Tom Thumb are put into a creepy, disturbing monster movie with hideous costumes and terrible make-up and sets that fifth graders could make better with paper and scissors. The dubbing of this Mexican-made oddity is so off and so badly cast that when the creepy kid playing Little Red starts singing, the dubbed voice sounds like a cabaret singer in her late 50s. You just have to see it to believe it. Some of the animal costumes are so molting looking and gross, it actually looks as if the fur has fleas or scabies.”
Murray himself dubbed the voice of Stinky the Skunk, whose high-pitched squeaks sound an awful lot like Alvin from the Chipmunks. Sad to say, but the Internal Revenue Service put Murray out of commission. He got into tax trouble, and the IRS seized all of his movies, taking them out of circulation. Before the Feds could hear the case, Murray died of a heart attack in 1979.
Hope you enjoy the show, and return again next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.
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Want to leverage social media to succeed in the new economy? Don’t think. Don’t work. Never inject an ounce of effort into it. H/T IMAO
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Nude nymphs followed by dancing girls, led by ballerina Colleen Bennet, regale Steve Reeves in Hercules Unchained. The 1959 box office hit was his first of many appearances as the mythical strongman. Hercules’ bride Iole was played by Sylva Koscina, the ravishing Yugoslav-born beauty who posed for Playboy in 1975, when she was 42.
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The hits just keep coming…H/T Reveal Politics
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The rich aren’t paying their fair share! That’s not just the mantra of Occupy Wall Street, even some executives are singing that tune. One of those executives is co-founder and former CEO of Costco Jim Sinegal. Sinegal lambasted the rich at the Democratic National Convention, then maneuvered to avoid paying taxes. Find out all about it on this episode of Trifecta, featuring Bill Whittle, Stephen Green and Scott Ott. H/T PJTV
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Hank Green of SciShow summarizes the five reasons why infrared telescopes were supposed to be impossible to build, and then describes how a team of scientists and engineers overcame those obstacles to build the James Webb Space Telescope.
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Bands like Green Day might market themselves as punk rock rebels, but in fact, they are hypocrites who have sold out to the Establishment by plugging bloated, Big Government policies. The punkers might sneer and ridicule the corporations, but they no longer can claim to be anti-establishment when they have embraced socialism and a creeping bureaucracy, argues Alfonzo Rachel in this edition of ZoNation. H/T PJTV
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We’ve reported on this before: With the economy of Greece in a shambles, many residents are fleeing the cities and returning to their rural roots. Here’s a report from Journeyman Pictures on a repatriation under way on the Greek islands.
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Here’s a blast from the past — a 1968 short that was the debut work by the late Russian animator Anatoliy Petrov. The premise: A veteran music teacher accepts the challenge of trying to teach a hippopotamus to sing. High notes — and low laughs — are delivered in this sharp, pencil-drawn animation.
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