Commander Riptide

What do Daffy Duck and Jean Renoir have in common? Raised in Southern California in the '50s and '60s, Todd McEwen found that the movies were everywhere. When The Wizard of Oz was shown on television, every kid in the neighbourhood gathered in the street the next day and acted it out instead of playing Cowboys and Indians, or even baseball. Every Saturday morning there were two or three hours of Laurel and Hardy films on a local station, presented by 'Commander Riptide' (a host who pretended to be in a submarine for some reason) and these films changed the way McEwen thought about life. From then on he always wanted everything to be funny, to the consternation of his parents and teachers, and this reached its apotheosis when he persuaded his mother to buy him a small can of aerosol shaving cream and a packet of little paper plates. At last he was going to be able to get hit in the face with a pie.
In this fond and exasperated look back at what movies were important to him - even crucial to his existence at differing ages - McEwen confronts some rather nauseating home truths about his love a number of key classic and cult films, including Blotto (1930), Duck Soup (1933), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and Chinatown (1974).