Group Mentality Affection

As opposed to what, "Walt Disney's Saddest Songs"?

When I was a kid, I loved to get those Disney song compilation albums, and not just for the music on them. I loved the album art with all the characters from the different movies on it, all mixed together. It was as if there was some parallel universe where, say, Baloo from The Jungle Book lived next door to Dumbo. I would listen to the records and stare at these album sleeves for hours, imagining the adventures of Peter Pan and Pinocchio, Snow White and Cinderella (cleaning, of course), all seven of the dwarfs and all one hundred and one Dalmatians, all together in their merry Disney neighborhood (no, not Celebration).

As I grew older, this "group mentality affection" (GMA for short) spread to my comic book collection, where such multi-hero super-groups as the Justice League of America and The Avengers were particular favorites.

My GMA of course applies to movies in general as well. All those film clip montages that they always show at the Oscars? You know, the ones most use for a quick potty break or a smoke outside? I can't get enough of them (Chuck Workman is a genius in my book). And I think this is one of the reasons why I love the AFI "100 Years" specials so much every year. To me they're like cinephile porn.

All of this is my roundabout way of drawing your attention to the nifty filmstrip artwork that graces this blog's header. I created it not just to make the top of each page more dynamic and professional looking, but to give readers a sense of what you'll find below it.

Each individual film image is from a favorite film of mine that represents not only some particular obsession of mine (animation, gay-themed films, a young Marlon Brando's chest), but also the evolution of film from the early silent era to the modern classics of today, thus conveying that this blog will cover all of film history, not just movies from the past twenty years or so (like every other movie site out there it seems).

And yes, each frame represents a different decade, but I'll leave it to you to name the nine films represented, from left to right (i.e., from the 1920's to the 2000's) in the handy-dandy comments section below.

Link via Imdb.com.