Shorts report for September 14, 2014

Somebody at TCM has decided to be nice to us by having all the shorts listed on the schedule for a good week in advnace. Not only that, but it looks as though there are going to be quite a few shorts coming up this week. As always when I mention upcoming shorts, though, I'll only be mentioning stuff coming up in the next 36 hours or so.

We start off with One For the Book at 7:40 PM tonight, just after With Six You Get Eggroll (6:00 PM, 95 min plus an intro/outro from Ben Mankiewicz). This short from 1940 has characters stepping out of books and performing musical and comedy numbers. It sounds somewhat familiar, although I also seem to remember a similar short that has characters in a toy room doing their thing. This one has a young Betty Hutton as Cinderella doing a couple of songs.

John Nesbitt's Passing Parade teaches us about the dangers of gossip in Whispers, at 9:48 PM tonight, or some time after The Old Maid (8:00, 95 minutes plus an intro/outro). I don't think I've seen this particular entry, and to be honest, I prefer some of the other series from back then to the Passing Parade shorts.

One of the more interesting series involved golfer Bobby Jones, who made eight or nine back in the early 1930s trying to teach people how to be better golfers, in a series called How to Break 90. Technology has made that task quite a bit easier, of course, and that's part of what makes old shorts -- especially these, although a lot of others share the trait -- interesting: they can be a bit of a time capsule. Anyhow, Bobby Jones is going to be teaching us the downswing, tomorrow morning at 8:49 AM, or just after The Unholy Garden (7:30 AM, 75 min).

Finally, we get a 1930s era RKO short, which doesn't seem to happen too often. This one is Neptune Mysteries, part of something called the Struggle to Live series, and is on at 11:34 AM tomorrow morning, after When a Feller Needs a Friend (10:15 AM, 74 min). This short looks at life under the sea, specifically a female octopus and some sea snails. Underwater photography has come a long way in the intervening 80 years.