The magic of Radiola

What a cozy advertisement from the 1929 Saturday Evening Post.  Now we have the magic of television. In this house, that means red envelopes from Netflix while they struggle to stay in business, and when the Clearwire gods are favorable, streaming Netflix movies.

We've been on a Bleak House kick (seriously) and just watched the excellent 2007 Masterpiece Theater version a second time.  You will not find more fascinating character development and fine acting on any production from the Emerald Isle.  Then we watched the original 1985 Bleak House mini-series starring Diana Riggs as Lady Deadlock. Also good Masterpiece Theater stuff, but darker and more difficult to follow.  Perhaps back in 1985, more people read Dickens and already knew the complicated story.

Last night we watched War Horse, a Spielberg movie based on a 1982 book by Michael Morpurgo. The story was also adapted into a 2007 play that was an instant hit.  The movie is about an English boy's beloved horse "Joey" that was sold to the calvary and shipped to France in WWI. Many, many terrible things happen to "Joey" before he is reunited with his owner at the end.

For a horse lover, this could be painful to watch, but I soon got distracted trying to spot all the different "Joey" actors used to make the movie (there were 10 horses.)  You think a little equine makeup can fool me? I'm sure John got tired of my blurting out, "there's another one!" as the long movie wore on.  And it was easy to remember this was just a movie when "Joey" got completely entangled in barbed wire and came out without a scratch.  So many bad things happened to people and animals you were almost numb by the end.

Poster from the "War Horse" play

I don't mean to make light of this most awful period in Western history. Human suffering aside, did you know over 8 million horses died in WWI?