Tag: Reviews

Side Jobs and Brief Cases – Two Short Story Collections from The Dresden Files – by Jim Butcher – An SF&F Book Review

photog Book Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews , , , , , , , , ,

These two books are each a group of short stories that Jim Butcher has collected.  Side Jobs was published in 2010 and Brief Cases was published in 2018.  In each case Butcher collected the stories that had been published in anthologies then added a new novella at the end.  And obviously the differences in subject matter and tone in the collections match up with the where they fit in the chronology of the Dresden Files at the time they were written.  But just as with the overall series the “feel” of the stories and especially the character of Harry himself is surprisingly consistent.  He is as always, a wise-cracking, annoying defender of the human world against the forces of the various supernatural creatures he opposes.  He battles White, Red and Black Court vampires, ghosts, sorcerers, werewolves, faeries and other folklore creatures.  Harry is always a little too lefty and feminist for my complete stamp of approval but Butcher writes a very good story and I have been reading these books for a very long time and even when some lefty cultural stance annoys me, I still read and enjoy the story.  And these stories are no exception.  Some character or some comment from Harry will annoy me but I’ll still read and enjoy each story.

The stories are self-sufficient and can be read alone without the need to jump into the next one.  And because the stories were written for various anthologies some of them have oddball plots that were picked to fit in to some overarching theme.  Like in Brief Cases there is a western story called “A Fistful of Warlocks” that was written for an anthology called “Straight Outta Tombstone.”  And likewise for other stories that had themes relating to weddings or relationships or even beer or baseball.  But even the stories that you would think would be just a throwaway Butcher puts in the work and makes the story hang together.  And in these short stories sometimes Harry isn’t even the narrator.  Thomas Raith, John Marcone, Karrin Murphy and even Molly Carpenter each narrate a story.   And especially in the case of Thomas and Marcone I think these add a lot of interest to the story because of the very different point of view of these characters from Harry.

Just as with the rest of the Dresden Files these books cannot be enjoyed unless you already have read the first few books about Harry.  But it is good to know that Jim Butcher takes the time to make even his short stories worth reading.

Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 25 – Bread and Circuses

photog Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F TV Show Reviews, Star Trek, TV Reviews , , , , , , , , , , ,

Holy absurdity Batman, here we go again with “Hodgkin’s Law of Parallel Planetary Development.”  It wasn’t enough to have Yangs and Kohms in the episode The Omega Glory.  Now we get a planet that has the Roman Empire.  But wait there’s more.  Rome survives into the twentieth century and their version of General Motors advertises for their latest car model, the Jupiter 8, by sponsoring televised gladiatorial games on their version of Wide World of Sports.  Oh the pain, the pain.

Six years earlier a merchant ship the “The Beagle” went missing.  Captain R.M. Merik commanded the ship and is known to Kirk because he washed out at the academy because he was a doofus.  The Enterprise finds the wrecked ship and Kirk, Spock and McCoy head down to the planet to find the crew.  There they are immediately captured, of course, and we find out that Merik is now emperor and called Merikus (nice latinizing).  And he’s persecuting the Sun worshippers.

Blah, blah, blah, Spock and McCoy are forced into the gladiatorial arena.  Blah, blah, blah, Kirk is enticed by the pretty blonde slave.  Blah, blah, blah, Scotty uses some engineering rigamarole to save the landing party when they’re about to be skewered.  Merik dies nobly after being a cowardly worm for the last six years.  Landing party escapes and leaves the planet alone because of the prime directive.  Spock jibber jabbers about the illogic of sun worship and Uhura corrects them that it isn’t “the sun up in the sky, it’s the Son of God.”

Great googly moogly.  They must have had nothing.  Okay, as parody there is some value here.  When the gladiator Flavius fails to convincingly attack McCoy in the arena one of the roman legionnaires whips him and threatens to have a special episode on television devoted to his death in the arena.  The tv announcer at the gladiatorial show is obviously done for laughs and is actually quite funny as satire of live tv production.  He has dials to allow him to add in cheering, boos, catcalls and laughter.  So as comedy the show has some value.  But what are the science fiction fans to make of this.  I guess that Star Trek had devolved into Gilligan’s Island.

The scenes with Kirk and the blonde slave girl allows at least a modicum of Shatner mockery value so I’ll give the episode a 4 // 5.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) – A Movie Review

photog Movie Reviews, Reviews , , , ,

I’ll start off by saying this is a terrible movie.  But maybe it’s so bad it’s good.

Frank Sinatra is an Army Major named Bennett Marco who is captured along with his platoon during the Korean War and sent into China to be brainwashed to be part of a political assassination plot that the Russians have arranged.  The platoon sergeant Raymond Shaw is the assassin and as it turns out his mother, played by Angela Lansbury, is the Russian agent who is his handler.  He is programmed to obey instructions that he gets after he’s been triggered by seeing the ace of diamonds during a solitaire game.  His mother is married to a United States Senator that she is going to get elected President by having her son assassinate the Republican presidential candidate.  If this isn’t crazy enough, his mother gets Shaw to assassinate his own newlywed wife and her United States Senator father in order to further the plan.

So, the plot is pretty crazy but it’s kind of fun in a way because of the way they present it.  We get these flash backs of the brainwashing camp.  The Russian doctor demonstrates the control he has over the prisoners by having Shaw kill two of the other prisoners on command.  And based on the false memories that are implanted in the prisoners Shaw gets the Congressional Medal of Honor for supposedly freeing them and killing some ridiculous number of North Korean troops.

Now this could have been a political thriller that works.  But the acting is unbelievably bad.  Some of the dialog is borderline ridiculous.  For instance, Janet Leigh plays a woman who meets Sinatra accidentally on a train and within a day she bails him out of jail for assaulting a Korean house boy and still decides to leave her fiancé to marry him.  And then there is this hilarious karate fight between Sinatra and a fake Korean guy.  It’s like something out of one of the Austin Powers movies.  One of his karate chops misses and ends up knocking an enormous chunk out of a wooden table.  But it looks as if it’s made of styrofoam.  I think that fight may have been the inspiration for Inspector Clouseau’s battles against his Oriental House Boy Kato in the Pink Panther movies.

I read that this is considered to be in several top 100 film lists.  I guess there’s no accounting for taste.

On a personal note, there is a scene in the movie that was filmed in a restaurant in Manhattan called Jilly’s.  Jilly Rizzo, the owner of the restaurant and the guy who is seen tending bar in the movie was one of Sinatra’s closest friends.  Jilly was convicted in 1990 of a loan fraud scheme on his restaurant that involved some very old acquaintances of mine.  And some of these acquaintances worked at Jilly’s and even knew Sinatra from his visits there.  I think the fraud scheme and this movie are in some ways kindred entities.  They both possess a spirit of inept dishonesty.  A bungled fraud.

So, this movie has a personal connection for me.  But that in no way changes my opinion of its quality.  If I remember correctly Sinatra did sometimes do some decent acting.  I’m going to watch “The Joker is Wild” again because I think he was pretty good in that.  I never noticed any acting going on in Ocean’s Eleven.  People say he was good in “From Here to Eternity.”  That part seemed a little melodramatic to me.  “The Man with the Golden Arm” never interested me.  Maybe he was good in it.  But without a doubt, The Manchurian Candidate was abysmally bad.

Recommended only as camp.

Chernobyl (2019) – A TV Series Review

photog Reviews, TV Reviews , , , , , ,

A good friend sent me the DVDs for the HBO five-part-series “Chernobyl.”  Most people are relatively familiar with the 1986 nuclear power plant catastrophe in the Soviet Union (present day Ukraine) by that name and lately there has been a lot of attention paid to the exclusion zone around the plant and how the environment around the plant has begun returning to a wild state without people inhabiting it.  And the disaster at Chernobyl was a very important event both for the Soviet Union and for the world because of the amount of negative sentiment that this failure cast on both the Soviet Union and also the nuclear power industry.  In fact, Gorbachev was said to have written in his memoirs that Chernobyl was the root cause of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

But it is important to state that this film history is a dramatic representation of the events and deviates in several particulars from the actual events.  And in general, the producers have amplified many of the details to make the story more compelling.  Whether there is an ideological component to this amplification is of course hard to say.  But whatever the motivation the dramatic effect is definitely compelling.

The main protagonist of the series is Valery Legasov, a senior Soviet scientist who takes the lead in first convincing the Soviet administration that a terrible disaster has occurred, then advising the emergency operation on how to mitigate the ongoing catastrophe and finally to expose the actual cause of the catastrophe and force the authorities to take the steps necessary to prevent another occurrence.

Other important characters include Boris Shcherbina a central government official who is reluctantly appointed to investigate and then execute the emergency actions needed to cope with the disaster on the ground; Vasily and Lyudmilla Ignatenko, a fire fighter and his wife who are among those who are exposed directly to the results of the hellish radiation levels existing at the site of the explosion; and finally, Ulana Khomyuk, a nuclear scientist who in actuality didn’t exist.  She is a composite of all the nuclear scientists who aided Legasov in his investigation of the causes of the Chernobyl disaster.  Since most people are more or less aware of the historical event let me get down to my reactions to the series.

The first episode is as riveting as a science fiction horror film.    When the explosion occurs the nuclear plant control room staff are told by the chief engineer on duty, Anatoly Dyatlov, that they are only dealing with a small fire caused by a hydrogen explosion in an auxiliary tank.  It appears he is in denial and he orders his crew and the arriving fire fighters to battle the blaze as if it is a normal fire.  Because of this they are effectively fed into the jaws of hell.

As Dyatlov and his superiors try to convince the Soviet officials that the disaster is a small unimportant event, Legasov starts to hear the evidence and at a meeting that includes Mikhail Gorbachev he declares that what has really occurred is the unthinkable.  That the reactor core has exploded and is now strewing enriched uranium into the air, contaminating the Soviet Union and Europe for thousands of miles around and killing anyone who comes close to the source.  When Boris Shcherbina objects that Legasov is just speculating Gorbachev tells him to go with Legasov to Chernobyl and get the facts.

From there the series follows this team to Chernobyl and chronicles their efforts to solve a problem that has never been seen before by humanity.  Interweaved are the stories of the others whose lives have been destroyed by their proximity to the disaster.  Soldiers, scientists, helicopter pilots, miners, doctors and nurses, government officials and family members.  And after the action on the ground there is a trial to lay the blame for Chernobyl at someone’s feet.  And it is at this trial that we finally find out exactly what went on in the control room right before the explosion and we get to see how the Soviet Union handles the truth.

It’s a harrowing story.  And it is well acted.  None of the actors are familiar to me but they are very good.  And mixed in with the horror there are personal moments that touch the viewer.  There are even a very few moments of humor.  I found I had a good deal of empathy for even some of the less noble characters.  They were human beings confronted with inhuman force.  And some of them acquitted themselves with intelligence and bravery.  That makes for a powerful story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xulAgMNK5Jk

 

Run Silent, Run Deep (1958) – A Movie Review

photog Movie Reviews, Reviews , , , , ,

This is a WWII submarine story.  A submarine commander P.J. Richardson, played by Clark Gable, survives the destruction of his submarine during operations against the Japanese in the Bungo Straits.  The Japanese destroyer responsible, called the Akikaze, had previously destroyed at least four submarines and Richardson is determined to have his revenge.  Richardson thinks he has figured out how to defeat the Akikaze and he convinces the navy to give him command of another submarine, the Nerka.  The Nerka’s executive officer, Lieutenant Jim Bledsoe, played by Burt Lancaster, has been disappointed in not being given the command, but he cooperates with Richardson and acts to convince the crew that the unorthodox and frustrating tactics that the commander puts them through are legitimate.

The commander brings the Nerka into the Bungo Straits and using his knowledge of the Japanese tactics he successfully engages a Japanese destroyer and destroys it.  But when he goes after the Akikaze the Japanese seem to know in advance of his presence and the Nerka is nearly destroyed, several men are killed and Richardson is badly injured.

But when Richardson orders Bledsoe to prepare for another attempt to destroy the Akikaze, he relieves Richardson of command based on medical disability and says that he will return the Nerka to base.  But Bledsoe changes his mind and attacks and destroys the Akikaze.  But during the attack Richardson realizes that the Akikaze was working with a Japanese submarine to destroy American submarines.  He alerts Bledsoe and the danger is averted and the Japanese sub is destroyed.  But Richardson dies of his injuries and the Nerka buries him at sea.

This is a fairly straight forward war movie.  But the principal actors Gable and Lancaster make it a very memorable film.  Some of the other actors do a good job.  Jack Warden is a veteran actor and is probably the standout among the supporting characters.  There is one amusing detail in the ship life.  The crew has a pin-up picture of a girl which they each pat on the butt before they go into battle.  This amusing and lifelike touch adds obvious interest for the natural audience of this movie.  Highly recommended.

The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard by Tyler James Cook – A Book Review

photog Book Reviews, Reviews , , , , , ,

Full disclosure, Tyler Cook is the proprietor of the website The Portly Politico, a fellow conservative and in my opinion a fine fellow.  He and I have shared many an interesting conversation on-line about a number of different topics, political and non-political.  He’s a multi-talented fellow and a good guy.  So, I wasn’t surprised to find that he has also self-published a book and asked me to review it.  And always on the look out for something good to review, I immediately agreed and he was kind enough to send me a review copy.

“The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard” is a short book and is made up of a number of “cases.”  The eponymous Inspector is a Sherlock Holmes-like savant who usually solves the case simultaneous with the initial narration of the crime.  But the final solution always involves logic that is a complete non sequitur to the clues.  That is the joke.

The thing that I noted was that the content of the stories reflect the various ages at which Tyler wrote them.  So, the earliest tales are very, very short and have solutions that defy any conventional logic.  They are what a teenage kid would find funny.  And as the series of stories progresses, they become more complex and the writing adds touches of noir-like characterization and other dramatic effect.

And finally, as the author enters adulthood his writing becomes mature and his story telling powers become developed.  The culmination is a story called, “Inspector Gerard and the Dead-End Job Caper.”  It is a comical piece that dramatizes Gerard’s ennui and determination to abandon crime-solving and take up a life as a fish-monger.  This story has everything.  Dramatic tension, character development, local color and timing.  Well, maybe not, but it is funny.

So here is the verdict.  Tyler Cook is a smart talented writer.  I can see that in the output of his blog.  “The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard” is a showcase of his earliest fiction writing output.  It reflects his sense of humor applied to the mystery genre.  It is amusing but very short.  I think the takeaway from this selection is that Tyler is going to write a longer and more commercial work in the future.

Tyler has the story on Amazon and I see it’s on kindle unlimited for free I believe.  Because of its short length and the ironic nature of much of the work I wouldn’t know if many folks would be happy to pay a lot for the collection.  But I encourage readers of the Portly Politico to try it out and then lobby Tyler to spread his wings and write the comic novel that he obviously has in him.

Kim (1950) – A Movie Review

photog Movie Reviews, Reviews , , , , , , , , ,

I remember finding a copy of the novel Kim in my home when I was a kid.  Not knowing much about colonial India at the time some of the references were obscure to me.  But the story was engaging.  Many years later I saw the motion picture and enjoyed the story all over again.  Errol Flynn and Dean Stockwell carry most of this movie on their shoulders with Stockwell as the title character, an orphan son of a British soldier living as a native boy in the streets of India and Flynn as a spy for the British Intelligence Office known as Mahbub Ali, The Red Beard.  And in the Flynn’s affable relationship with the boy, it reminds me of his performance in the 1937 movie “The Prince and the Pauper” where his character befriends and ultimately saves the Prince of Wales from his misadventures.

This story is a cloak and dagger spy story of the “The Great Game” between England and Russia in Asia and also a coming-of-age story for the boy.  He discovers his roots and makes some valuable friends.  He learns different lessons about himself from sources as different as a Tibetan Lama and a British Intelligence Officer.

And along the way he shows himself to be brave, resourceful and reliable to all those he befriends.  The story is one of Kipling’s best and has a fantasy feel to it that belies the 19th century time frame it exists in.  Stockwell and Flynn and the supporting cast are excellent in this tale and it is a throwback to the 1930s and 40s when movies of this sort were more common.  And the portrayal of life in colonial India with Europeans enjoying their white privilege would be completely unacceptable to woke viewers so of course knowing it would outrage those losers makes it that much more amusing to watch.

Read the book if you haven’t and then watch the movie.  Both are highly recommended.

The Dunwich Horror (1970) – A Science Fiction and Fantasy Movie Review

photog Movie Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Movie Reviews , , , , , , , , , , ,

(War Pig loves really bad sf&f movies.  This one’s for you War Pig.)

This movie is so monumentally bad that I feel compelled to dissect its awfulness so that we can learn something from it.  First of all, look at the date.  1970 is something of a low water mark in American cinema.  Now granted this was produced by American International Pictures and they only ever made really cheap and schlocky movies.  But that sets the stage for how this movie became what it was.  Next, the story is an old H.P. Lovecraft story so the cost of buying the movie rights must have been pretty close to zero.

Next take a look at the actors.  Sam Jaffe and Ed Begley were actual actors at one time but their careers were coming to an end and they probably really needed the money.  Dean Stockwell was a young guy whose career had begun as a child actor in the big studio system but with that system now a thing of the past he would earn his daily bread working in schlock and it suited him.  Sandra Dee was a product of the post war teen movies of the late fifties and early sixties.  She had played all the Gidget and Tammy parts and was now too old to be the girl next door.  This was what was next on her ride to oblivion.  It’s also funny to see that before she got some big screen parts in movies like the Godfather and Rocky, Talia Shire had a small role in this stinker.  So, there are some actual actors in this movie.  But what can they do with this thing?

And finally, what is the plot?  Well, in the original Lovecraft story Wilbur Whateley, played by Dean Stockwell, and his monstrous twin are the product of some kind of bizarre ritualistic impregnation of their mother by one of the Great Old Ones, Yog-Sothoth.  The book chronicles the attempt by Wilbur to use the Necronomicon to allow Yog-Sothoth to break through from his own dimension and conquer Earth and eat all the humans for lunch.

But the geniuses at American International Pictures decided that what Wilbur wanted was to go for another generation of Yog-Sothoth baby making and Sandra Dee would be the baby mama.  The monster brother is still in the plot but it seems like a sort of dangling appendage that nobody knows what to do with.

Ed Begley is Dr. Henry Armitage, a university professor who has a copy of the Necronomicon and is Sandra Dee’s boss.  He will try to save her life and foil Whateley’s diabolical plan.  And to round out the cast Sam Jaffe is “Old Whateley,” Wilbur’s grandfather who seems to have inexplicably changed his mind about being an evil servant of the Great Old Ones and now just runs around warning everyone about how dangerous everything is.  Comically they’ve painted thick black eyebrows on his face.  He sort of looks like Groucho Marx in that sense.

Well, before you know it Wilbur convinces Sandra Dee to come to his groovy farmhouse and drink some tea and after he pulls the distributor cap off her car’s motor, she has to spend the night.  She has dreams that look like they were filmed with my kid brother’s super 8 movie camera.  Semi-naked hippies who look like rejects from the Manson family hopped up on hair tonic and looking for love chase her around.  It’s quite ridiculous.  When she wakes up, she shares these dreams with Wilbur and we can see that it’s all having the hoped-for result.  She’s looking for some Yog-Sothoth action.  So, Wilbur brings her up to an oceanside cliff with an altar where she will wear some kind of poncho-like garment that allows the cameraman to show us the side of her leg and butt for what seems like hours.  And Wilbur spreads her legs apart and props the Necronomicon against her groin while he reads passages to Yog-Sothoth.

At some point Wilbur’s brother breaks out of his room and eats about five people including Talia Shire.  We never really get a good look at him.  He’s got tentacles and eyes and I don’t know what else.  He makes guttural noises and he has problems with his adenoids for sure.

Finally, Ed Begley shows up at the cliff and he and Wilbur posture and spout meaningless syllables at each other.  Begley’s babbling proves to be the stronger and Wilbur’s head bursts into flames and he jumps off the cliff.  We briefly see what might be Yog-Sothoth appear as a cartoon character suspended over Sandra Dee’s groin before he disappears.  Then Ed Begley helps her off the altar and the movie ends but as it ends, we see an image of a fetus near Sandra Dee’s belly.  Yog-Sothoth scored again!

So, there it is.  It’s embarrassing to admit I even made it to the end of this awful waste of time.  As far as I know Talia Shire is the only living victim of this terrible thing.  I imagine it still haunts her.  Maybe her rich brother Francis Ford Coppola can buy the rights to the movie and destroy every copy so their family’s shame can end.  I’ve never been a big fan of Lovecraft’s prose.  His imagination was fertile and the images he came up with were vivid.  But his prose style was lackluster.  But even he deserves better than this.  The Dunwich Horror was one of his better stories.  Maybe someday someone will do a decent job of making a movie of it.  This was not that movie.

Finding the Good in Today’s World – Part 1

photog Current Events, Reviews, TV Reviews , , , , ,

Going through the news and what passes for entertainment today is a pretty grim process.  It seems it’s woke wreckage and infantilism all the way down.  But if you let the mainstream media and the progressives in New York and Hollywood blind you to what else is out there then you’ve played into their hands.  Admittedly, it is work to “find the good” but it’s not an impossible task.

I’ll confess, I often fall back on complaining about how bad things have gotten and longing for the good old days.  But that doesn’t help anyone.  And in my defense, I do reviews of books, movies, tv shows and country music.  I do get a small but steady search traffic for those things and so I can claim that I do my small part for increasing the knowledge base of people interested in “finding the good.”  But I think it’s a good idea to put together information in an organized form and maybe supplement it with some comments.  After all I am what the idiot children call an “opinion leader” which I guess is a synonym for opinionated jerk.  So here goes.

First things first.  I believe in owning physical copies.  I buy paper books, CDs and DVDs.  I think some of the things I like will be cancelled by the industries that own them and will disappear.  And now we see Disney putting warnings on their old movies and publishers eliminating Dr. Seuss.  Well, okay.  Of course, I’ll need to buy a good supply of DVD players.  But they’re so cheap that it’s reasonable to do.  I’ve got a few hundred DVDs and a few hundred CDs and I used to have thousands of books but I pared that back a good deal and now it’s a few hundred of those.

And owning the physical copies means if I want to watch “The Sting” or read “Huckleberry Finn” I don’t have to search for a streaming service that hasn’t cancelled these works because they use forbidden words or ideas.  That’s enormously powerful.  And convenient.  Most of the streaming services only possess a small fraction of the “good” things you might want to see or hear or read.  Just yesterday I read that the BBC is going back and expurgating the “racist” dialog that they’ve discovered in John Cleese’s “Fawlty Towers” tv show.  John Cleese is a pompous fool who now regrets the thought policing that he and his generation introduced.  But I have the DVDs for that show and if I want to be reminded of when he actually was funny, I can watch them, so-called racism and all!

The next thing that you can use when looking for the good is chronological.  Basically, anything created before 1960 is probably free from systemic cultural poisoning.  Now granted there were plenty of leftists even back then but they had not captured the arts completely.  So, for instance, if you look at the book or movie awards from those years you will note that most of the books and movies are readable or watchable.  There are of course exceptions.  But compare that to the winners of book and movie awards today.  For me an Academy Award from the last decade or so is almost a guarantee that the movie is unwatchable psychobabble or celebrates disgusting sexual deviancy.  Nowadays it takes a review from someone I trust to get me to watch a movie or read a book.

So, I’ve gone on for a page with generalities.  In the next installments of this series, I’ll pick one area and provide some recommendations on things I’ve found that are good.  But just to get the ball rolling I’ll throw out one recommendation.

Modern television show: “Justified”

Here is a show that ran from 2010 to 2015 that was based on stories by Elmore Leonard, a truly great crime writer and running to almost eighty episodes and there isn’t a bad episode in the bunch.  That’s pretty rare.  Timothy Olyphant, Nick Searcy and Walton Goggins give highly entertaining and nuanced performances and even a racist, sexist homophobe such as myself will admit that Hollywood didn’t screw this show up somehow.  Camera Girl and I have re-watched this series every few years and we still enjoy every episode.  I hope I never wear out the fun of watching it.

Rhapsody in Rivets (1941) – An OCF Classic Movie Review

photog Movie Reviews, OCF Classic Movie Reviews, Reviews , , , , ,

I have stretched the definition of movie to include this Warner Brothers’ Merrie Melodies cartoon.  It consists of a construction crew of humans and animals building the “Umpire State Building.”  The foreman is “conducting”  Franz Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2” using the workmen as his orchestra.  Bricklayers, laborers banging in stakes, riveters, carpenters, and cement mixers are all employed to produce the music of the symphony.  It’s extremely entertaining.  Finally it’s almost 5pm so the conductor starts playing at break neck speed and the building shoots up into the sky at ludicrous speed.. And when a cloud gets in the way they build the building laterally to avoid it.  Finally the capstone gets a flag that says Umpire State the crowd applauds and the conductor takes his bow.  Then a little Bassett hound workman slams a door closed and the whole things comes crashing down.

I could only find the entire cartoon on a  russian site for free.  If you remember it and liked it or have never seen it check it out.  Highly recommended.