Two things today: firstly, the 43rd anniversary of the (US) premiere of the preposterous — and, to me at least glorious — Flash Gordon, and I’m not sure there’s a better summary of it than this:
As well as Brian Blessed telling producer Dino de Laurentiis
I’m bloody made for this. I saw it as a child. If you don’t give it to me I’m going to bloody kill you
there’s the fact that the Arborian priest is playwright John Osborne.
Osborne was mates with director Mike Hodges, which is why he’s also in Get Carter.
It’s also the 20th birthday of this marvellous news story:
…which concerns pastor and (apparently) unwitting filth-peddler Frithjof Schwesig, who ordered 300 copies of an educational film about the Gospel of Luke for his flock, but found that only 100 of what arrived were what he was after.
CNN reported him saying that
In a first batch 20 to 30 videos were distributed and we immediately got a reaction from five to seven people saying we must have given them the wrong film.
Apparently, “five to seven” households saw something they shouldn’t have.
The correct videos were eventually distributed to all 360 households in the village of Lampoldshausen in Baden-Württemberg, and “110 … asked for a follow-up discussion”.
This was enough for Pastor Schwesig to pronounce the operation “extremely successful”, and anyway, he reasoned,
The person who originally ordered the porn now has a Jesus film in the recorder.
