The Rocky Horror Super 8 Digest

Tonight marks the 40th anniversary of not one but two significant events of the last half of the twentieth century: Richard Nixon’s resignation and the events of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  Well, sort of on both accounts…

Nixon actually officially left office the next day, August 9, but he gave his resignation speech on the evening of August 8. And that is the link to Rocky Horror: its what’s playing on the car radio when Brad and Janet break down!  So we can conclusively set the date of Rocky Horror to August 8, 1974…or can we…

“America needs a full-time President, and a full-time Congress…”
There is some doubt shed on this by The Criminologist because he actually notes at the start that this happened on a November evening.  There are many theories as to why, if this was really in November (of what year then?) why would a re-playing of Nixon’s resignation be on the radio.  Some suggest Brad and Janet go through a time warp…get it?  Or perhaps its a jab at the Criminologist.  But the theory I go with is the film makers used the original Rocky stage script, threw the Nixon thing in as a joke and/or after-thought, and since they were mostly Brits didn’t notice or care about the discrepancy (or maybe they did and left it in anyway!).  In the absence of anything other compelling evidence though I think we can safely assume that the events did in fact occur on the evening of August 8 and early morning of August 9, 1974 (BTW, I was a bouncing 14 months old then!)
One last bit of linkage before we get to the screening.  Both Tricky Dick and The Dick Tricker (yeah, I know how bad that is) had their downfall that evening.  And now, probably for the first time in history, I’ve attempted to compare the moment when each realized their gig was up.  Its actually erie how similar their expressions were…
And now for the screening…

As I posted a while back I have not one but two copies of the Super8 version of The Rocky Horror Picture show.  Both are in good shape (and I could part with one for the right price…).  This is of course the digest version and omits several songs and key scenes, and in fact Eddie (Meatloaf) isn’t even in the film at all, not even hinted at!  But as far as these Super8 digests go this one does a very good job of telling the (mostly) complete story, or at least A complete story, and if you hadn’t seen the film (two or three dozen [hundred]) times you probably won’t feel the missing bits.  I do, but then again there was a time when I was a regular Frankie Fan.

I had hoped to have a lot of good pictures from the screening, but my phone is starting to become a real pain in the A and it did not take good pictures at all.  And of course it died before the end of the film (and its only 14 minutes long!)  But in any case here’s what I was able to get:

And one last one, this is a comparison between the “restored” Super8 version done by Dr Sapistein and my version (again a bad photo from my damn phone).  I hesitated putting this up because it looks nothing like it does in person, but there you go, the joys of trying to capture analog glory with digital mediocrity.