Is there any crime in giving yourself over to pleasure? No, not according to Dr. Frank N Further, as he's seducing Brad in the boudoir. And one of the great pleasures of the Rocky Horror Picture Show is its complete abandon of reason in favor of fun, and how readily audiences are willing to play along.
My guest this week is Matthew Hintzen, senior code wrangler for the app MyRadar. He found Rocky Horror in its early days: the late 70s, when the world was just discovering how strange a midnight movie could be. At the time, he was mostly closeted, struggling to find love, and on the verge of running away from home to live on the streets. A little absolute pleasure in the form of a strange movie and stranger audience was just what he needed -- but, he eventually found, there's a dangerous down side to becoming emotion's slave.
Here's a bunch of Rocky Horror delights:
And here's Hadji from Johnny Quest. Possibly a troubling depiction, racially speaking.
We also talked about An Early Frost, which I've always found melodramatic to the point of being a little hard to take seriously.
Music:
Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/