Tuesday, 10/24

Why yes, I knew about that U.P. tie in to another pop culture classic, too. But I'm embarrassed to mention I just found out about it a year or so ago.

Yesterday I mentioned about how you can tie “It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” and Marquette together via a road sign Snoopy comes across. Well, that prompted an e-mail from daily blog reader Donna in Marquette, who also wondered if I knew about the tie-in between the U.P. and the Beatles' movie “A Hard Day's Night”. Why yes, Donna, I do. But like I said, it took an embarrassingly long time for me to discover it.

First of all, let me say that I LOVE the movie “A Hard Day's Night”. I first saw it in the 80s during its big screen revival, and I've watched the DVD dozens of times since. The music's great, the performances are cheeky (and amazingly funny), and I'm still of the opinion that movie videos (and by extension MTV) would not have existed without the way that Richard Lester directed the flick.

It was the template for everything that came after it.

Anyway, back to the connection between the movie and the U.P. In the film, Ringo is a bit picked upon by the other members of the group, especially because he's always wanting to do thing like (gasp) read a book. Now what I didn't know is that Ringo was always trying to read a specific book, a book that escaped my attention the dozens of times I had watched the movie and knew nothing about until a Facebook thing about it made the rounds a year or so ago.

And just what book was Ringo trying to read?

Yup; Ringo, picked upon in the movie for trying to read a book, was trying to read “Anatomy of a Murder”, written by Ishpeming's John Voelker.

I can't believe I didn't know that; after finding out about it I felt tempted to go stand in a corner and feel shame for a few minutes. But as soon as I found out I whipped out the DVD, threw it in, fast-forwarded to the exact scene (because, at least I knew where THAT was) and stood there with my jaw agape as you could see Ringo, indeed, trying to read “Anatomy”. I have no idea how I missed it the first several dozen times I saw the movie, but I did. And all it took was hundreds (if not thousands) of people pointing it out on Facebook.

See? Social media DOES have something to recommend it, I guess.

So in case you didn't know, there's the story of how a second pop culture classic can be connected to Marquette County. Small world, isn't it?

(jim@wmqt.com)