Memorial Day weekend 2013 begins

This coming Monday is Memorial Day in the US, which means that once again TCM is showing a whole bunch of war films for the next three days, starting at 6:00 AM tomorrow. The theme for Saturday morning and afternoon is submarine films, a them that TCM used two years ago. (To be fair, there are only so many themes one can use when it comes to any specific genre of movie.) In fact, I mentioned that when I blogged about Run Silent, Run Deep, which is unsurprisingly showing up on Saturday at 2:15 PM.

At any rate, I was thinking of mentioning some of the shorts anyhow. TCM has a couple programmed on Saturday, and they've actually done a good job of having them fit in with the war films theme. Well, at least two of them. Sherman Said It kicks things off a little after 7:40 AM, or after the feature Hell Below, which comes no at 6:00 AM and is a movie about World War I-era submarines, which alone makes it interesting. Sherman Said It is a Charley Chase short about him trying to return home from France after the end of the war, which of course was not known as World War I at the time because World War II hadn't started.

The other two shorts come on just before Destination Tokyo begins at 10:00 AM. The Ash Can Fleet, at 9:38 AM, is about David Bushnell, a real person who, during the Revolutionary war, invented the first submarine used in combat, and also invented the time bomb. That's followed at 9:50 AM by Modern Tokyo, an early Traveltalks short from 1935, which has nothing to do with war but of course dovetails nicely with Destination Tokyo.