Back in the early 1960's there was a program that I loved, called "Fractured Flickers" hosted by actor and voice man Hans Conried. The show featured old silent movie clips, dubbed with humorous comments, storylines, sound effects and music. Since the show was produced by Jay Ward (think Rock & Bullwinkle) the voices included June Foray, Bill Scott and Paul Frees. There were only 26 episodes released and of course it was in syndication for several years.
Woody Allen's 1966 movie "What's Up Tiger Lily" took the same idea but applied it to a Japanese spy movie. Overdubbing the dialogue, sound effects and music for the entire movie. In the mid-80's The LA Connection - a LA based improve group did a series for Nick-At-Night called "Mad Movie's With The LA Connection". The group would sit in the theatre while watching a movie and improv the lines - with hysterical results. This lead to the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 series which had a generous run from the late 80's - 1990's.
Over the years, some magazines and books were published that used the same concept to "fracture photographs (or fotographs)" Using old movie stills and images from movies cartoon balloons would be used for the dialogue, sometimes in a single frame, or "gag" type cartoon and sometimes in a comic strip format. However it was presented, they were pretty hilarious. There was a series of bubble gum cards published in the 60's called "Spook Cards" - I collected them all and still have quite few. The series used many of the monsters from old Universal films with humous captions on the front. The back of the featured a monster "joke".
My friend Bryce Zabel has been producing humorous stills to accompany his movie review website called Movies Smackdown.
Now that Flickr is so popular, I thought that we here at The Wheezer Society could have some fun, applying the "Fractured Flickrs" concept to images from the wonderful world of Flickr - so many images to choose from! Enjoy.
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