classic movies Archives - Retro Reminiscing Video and Pictures

The Ghost and Mr. Chicken — “ATTABOY, LUTHER!”

There are movies that are funny and there are movies that are spooky. Somehow The Ghost and Mr. Chicken managed to be both.

This 1966 movie was one of Don Knotts’ first big steps after leaving The Andy Griffith Show, and there was a lot riding on it. He had left Mayberry to pursue a movie career with Universal, and this one reportedly cost about $500,000 and grossed around $4 million in its first five months.

Not a bad start.

A lot of Mayberry followed him over. Andy Griffith helped with the story without taking credit, writers Jim Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum came from The Andy Griffith Show, and Don personally wanted Alan Rafkin to direct.

Andy even suggested one of the movie’s most remembered running jokes:

“Attaboy, Luther!”

But I think one of the reasons this movie still works so well is the music.

Vic Mizzy wrote the score in only four days. He was also the man who wrote the themes for The Addams Family and Green Acres, and you can certainly hear his style here.

He used organ, xylophone, fuzz guitar and even bass harmonica, but nothing beats that creepy haunted organ inside the Simmons mansion. You could be laughing at Don Knotts one minute and genuinely getting creeped out the next.

And that bloody organ produced another great story. Universal spent weeks trying to clear the Bon Ami joke, so Don Knotts finally called the company president himself. He explained the joke and got permission almost immediately.

The movie was filmed in only 17 days, but nearly 60 years later people are still saying:

“Attaboy, Luther!”

Do you still watch The Ghost and Mr. Chicken around Halloween?

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These Skeletons Terrified Me! Jason and the Argonauts

I was five when I saw this in the theatre, and it terrified me! I mean, if the skeletons are already dead, how do you stop them?
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The skeleton battle in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) stayed with me—and learning how it was made makes it even more remarkable. Ray Harryhausen brought those skeletons to life through stop-motion animation, moving the models a tiny amount between photographs. The sequence took four and a half months to animate. Some days, he produced less than one second of finished footage.
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Four and a half months to make it. About six seconds to scare me!
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But here’s my favorite part: the filmmakers wrestled with the same question I had at five. How DO you kill something that’s already dead?
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Their solution was to have Jason jump off a cliff into the sea, with the skeletons following him. Harryhausen’s explanation? “We assumed that they couldn’t swim.”
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To film the plunge, the crew actually threw seven plaster skeletons off the cliff after the stuntman jumped. They had to get it right the first time because they couldn’t retrieve them. Harryhausen later wrote that those plaster bones were still somewhere down there in the sea.
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So my five-year-old self was asking the same question as the people making the movie. Their solution was to throw the problem into the ocean!
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Do you remember these skeletons? What movie terrified you when you were little?

1984: Red Dawn Invades Theaters

Today marks the anniversary of the release of Red Dawn, which opened in theaters on August 10, 1984. For anyone who grew up during the Cold War, the idea of Soviet and Cuban paratroopers suddenly dropping into an American high school felt a lot more believable then than it probably does today

Patrick Swayze led a remarkably young cast that also included Charlie Sheen, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson and Jennifer Grey. Their characters escaped into the mountains and became the Wolverines, a teenage resistance group fighting the occupying forces. Swayze and Grey would reunite just three years later in a very different movie, Dirty Dancing

Red Dawn also holds an unusual place in movie history. The MPAA had only recently created the PG-13 rating, and when the film opened on August 10, 1984, it became the first PG-13 movie actually released in American theaters

The movie began as a screenplay called Ten Soldiers by Kevin Reynolds before director John Milius reshaped it into the version we know. Although the story takes place in Colorado, much of it was filmed around Las Vegas, New Mexico, which was transformed into the fictional town of Calumet

It was considered extremely violent for its time, but audiences responded. The movie earned more than twice its reported production budget domestically and became one of those films that seemed to capture the tension and fears of the early 1980s

Its influence even reached the real military. When U.S. forces captured Saddam Hussein in 2003, the mission was called Operation Red Dawn, with search locations named “Wolverine 1” and “Wolverine 2” after the movie

Cocoon: The Movie You May Need a DVD to See

I’m posting the trailer for Cocoon, and it is strange to say this about such a well-known 1980s movie, but today the trailer may be easier to find than the movie itself.

Released in 1985 and directed by Ron Howard, Cocoon was one of those movies that felt different. It was science fiction, but not the laser-blasting kind. It was warm, funny, and surprisingly emotional — a story about growing older, feeling young again, and wondering what you would do if life suddenly offered you more time.

The cast was loaded with familiar faces: Don Ameche, Wilford Brimley, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Jack Gilford, Gwen Verdon, Maureen Stapleton, Brian Dennehy, and Steve Guttenberg. The story followed a group of seniors who discover that swimming in a certain pool gives them new energy, thanks to alien cocoons hidden beneath the water.

For a movie about aging, it had a magical feeling. It made older characters the center of the story, not the background, and that helped make it stand out.

What makes it even stranger now is how hard Cocoon has become to watch. It was released on DVD, but it is not currently streaming in the U.S. and is not sitting there waiting on the usual rental or purchase services like so many other ’80s movies. For most people, that old physical DVD is still the only practical way to see it legally.

Why? No one seems to have given a clear official answer. The likely reasons are the usual modern mess: old rights agreements, possible music clearance issues, studio ownership changes, and maybe simple corporate neglect. It was a 20th Century Fox movie, and after the Fox library ended up under Disney, this Oscar-winning hit somehow became one of those films that just fell through the cracks.

That makes Cocoon a perfect reminder of why physical media still matters. If you have the DVD, you can watch it. If you do not, you may be stuck waiting and wondering why a hit movie with this cast has almost disappeared from everyday viewing.

Do you remember watching Cocoon?