vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
The Hottest Show in Town was originally released in Sweden in 1974 as Sex-Cirkusse, and just as promised by the Japanese poster art above, you get a circus, a hot one, populated by assorted acrobats, aerialists, and clowns, some nude, some not. You also see people hook up, explicitly, which is really the entire point of this production. These bits earned the film an x rating, as well as some controversy caused by a sex sequence involving a very small man and a very small woman—aka dwarves. This isn’t particularly shocking today. Or is it? Certainly dwarves are more mainstream now. Game of Thrones even features the horniest little person in entertainment history, so we’re guessing Sex-Cirkusse‘s dwarf sex won’t bother you. We could be wrong. But dwarves, clowns, and aerialists are all a sideshow. The real star of the movie is Danish actress Anne Bie Warburg, seen below in her bushy altogether, a bold image we couldn’t resist sharing. We guess the general thrust of the film is that all the world’s a circus and all its denizens merely players. Really horny ones. The Hottest Show in Town premiered in Japan today in 1976.
BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.
Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.
Actress Joanne Woodward receives the first star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Los Angeles sidewalk at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street that serves as an outdoor entertainment museum. Woodward was one of 1,558 honorees chosen by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce in 1958, when the proposal to build the sidewalk was approved. Today the sidewalk contains more than 2,800 stars.
Satchel Paige becomes the first player from America’s Negro Baseball League to be voted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Paige, who was a pitcher, played for numerous Negro League teams, had brief stints in Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Major Leagues, before finally retiring in his mid-fifties.
The Allende Meteorite, the largest object of its type ever found, falls in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The original stone, traveling at more than ten miles per second and leaving a brilliant streak across the sky, is believed to have been approximately the size of an automobile. But by the time it hit the Earth it had broken into hundreds of fragments.
