Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Richard III and Felix the Cat at the Top of the Foshay Tower

Felix in Hollywood. Dir. Otto Messmer. 1923. DVD. Sling Shot Entertainment, 1999.

Although this one was not mentioned by the article, it fits in Richard III week well under the category "No Escape from Shakespeare."

I wasn't really searching for Shakespeare when I went to the small museum kept at the top of the Foshay Tower in downtown Minneapolis (along with a marvelous observation platform), but there he was, embedded in a cartoon from 1923.

The Foshay Tower was built during the Roaring Twenties, and the museum directors decided to give their visitors something of a taste of that time in American history. Felix the Cat must have sprung to mind, and the cartoon short Felix Goes to Hollywood can be played from one of the museum's kiosks.

In the film, there's a brief parody of one of Richard's best-known lines:


Links: The Film at IMDB. The Foshay Tower at Wikipedia.

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
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