Bobby Darin’s house, photo by Jim Cherry

Dale Sizer pretends he’s Bobby

My friend Jim Cherry just went on a tour of Bobby Darin’s midcentury Hollywood Hills home, and he wrote up the tour with photos in a recent blog post on his MySpace. Dale Sizer, who happened to be mentioned in my post earlier today, was also there to check out the digs.

The house is at 1411 Rising Glen Road, and has 5 bedrooms, 3.5 baths. Jim reports that it’s relatively un-mucked with. It’s being offered for just shy of 3.7M. Here’s the property’s website, with a full photo tour.

This website features a life-sized image of a whale. Of course, even if you have an extremely large monitor you’ll still need to scroll the photo to see it all.

The little red rectangle represents the area of part of the image that fits on my laptop’s monitor

[via John Nack]

Easter’s just around the corner, and another holiday brings more Rankin/Bass. Yay! Rankin/Bass made two Easter-themed specials: 1971’s “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” and 1977’s “The Easter Bunny Is Comin’ to Town”.

Here Comes Peter Cottontail

I haven’t seen “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” since I was a kid. I don’t remember it very well, but it’s probably the better of the two, and I’m really eager to see it again. It’s available on DVD, and I’m going to try to get it before Easter.

Watch out: there’s an utterly despicable 2005 sequel called “Here Comes Peter Cottontail: The Movie.” About 20 minutes into trying to watch it, I developed Tourette’s. If you’ve seen the 2001 sequel to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, “Rudolph and the Island of Misfit Toys,” then you have an idea of how bad the Peter Cottontail sequel is. If you haven’t heard of either of them, just do whatever you can to steer clear of them.

The Easter Bunny Is Comin’ to Town

“The Easter Bunny Is Comin’ to Town” is a whole ‘nother egg hunt… and it’s actually just a re-tread of “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town.” Just as the Santa Claus in that special bears little resemblance to the Santa seen in the Rudolph special, this tale has nothing in common with the Peter Cottontail special — the protaganist here is Sunny the Bunny.

In both “Comin’ to Town”s: the narrator is a postman played by Fred Astaire; the holiday icon (Sunny in “Easter Bunny”, Kris Kringle in “Santa Claus”) lives in one town, and wants to deliver their holiday gifts to children in another town; delivery of the gifts is thwarted by the authority figure in the town, and sneaky ways to get the gifts delivered in the dark of night are developed; and along the way, today’s well-known traditions are spawned. Oh — and both figures also have trouble getting over a mountain between the two towns, because of a big scary monster type of obstruction that by the end of the special has learned to be good. It’s like they just took one script and filled it in Mad Libs-style to get two specials out of it.

Despite the strange deja vu feeling of watching “Easter Bunny,” it’s not half bad. The thing that bugs me is that the jelly beans look more like jelly noodles. It’s kind of weird.

Vintage plaster fish, from Bowling Trophy

These are just some of the lovely vintage plaster wall fish that have been posted on the new blog, Bowling Trophy. There’s no name attached to the blog, but if it is who I think it is, then his one-two punch of excellent photography skills matched with uncanny thrifting ability should combine into a really swell blog.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks

I think these fish are great; they often have really great shaded paint jobs that make them look almost like sugar candy or marzipan. Their happy and alluring demeanor always reminds me of the underwater sequence in Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

Fishing for a Compliment, by Dale Sizer

My friend Dale Sizer did this cool painting of plaster wall fish on a slice of a log a few years ago.