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?
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