Mild mannered pet shop owner becomes serial nuisance.
Above is a Japanese poster for 1962’s Mr. Peter’s Pets, one of the many nudie cutie flicks that were made during the 1960s. With a term like nudie cutie you might guess that the plots are mere means to rear ends, and you’d be right. In this one a pet shop owner orders a potion from a catalog, sending a dollar to India for Maharaja Poon Ja’s Animal Ambrosia, a Hindu elixir that ensures long life and happiness for one’s pets. But before he administers the elixir to his animals he decides, “Only if it is good enough for me is it good enough for my little friends,” and tastes it himself. It goes down accompanied by a bolt of lightning and a peal of thunder—sort of like when you do a Jäger shot. But instead of merely making him act like an animal he’s literally turned into one. Specifically, a turtle. Each time he takes the elixir he turns into a different animal, almost any type he wishes, from kittens to pythons.
Acting for the benefit of others never occurs to this guy. He immediately uses his power to gain proximity to unsuspecting women so he can watch them take bubble baths, play guitar nude, and so forth. It's justas silly as it sounds. Yes, it’s about a shapeshifting stalker, but nudie cuties were threat-free. Mr. Peter is a mere pain in the ass, ultimately chased away by a group of annoyed sunbathers. What’s sometimes interesting with these movies is to see if any cast members later became more widely known. In this case, not so much. Some of the performers appeared in Russ Meyer movies, and some, like Althea Currier and Pavla Tiano (below), were already famous on the burlesque circuit, but none made the leap into mainstream fame. We can see why. Mr. Peter’s Pets is really bad. But of course it was never supposed to Citizen Kane so you can hardly hold low ambition against it. It’s worth a gander.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1986—Otto Preminger Dies
Austro–Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. 1998—James Earl Ray Dies
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray's fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King's killing, but with Ray's death such questions became moot. 1912—Pravda Is Founded
The newspaper Pravda, or Truth, known as the voice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, begins publication in Saint Petersburg. It is one of the country's leading newspapers until 1991, when it is closed down by decree of then-President Boris Yeltsin. A number of other Pravdas appear afterward, including an internet site and a tabloid. 1983—Hitler's Diaries Found
The German magazine Der Stern claims that Adolf Hitler's diaries had been found in wreckage in East Germany. The magazine had paid 10 million German marks for the sixty small books, plus a volume about Rudolf Hess's flight to the United Kingdom, covering the period from 1932 to 1945. But the diaries are subsequently revealed to be fakes written by Konrad Kujau, a notorious Stuttgart forger. Both he and Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann go to trial in 1985 and are each sentenced to 42 months in prison. 1918—The Red Baron Is Shot Down
German WWI fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen, better known as The Red Baron, sustains a fatal wound while flying over Vaux sur Somme in France. Von Richthofen, shot through the heart, manages a hasty emergency landing before dying in the cockpit of his plane. His last word, according to one witness, is "Kaputt." The Red Baron was the most successful flying ace during the war, having shot down at least 80 enemy airplanes. 1964—Satellite Spreads Radioactivity
An American-made Transit satellite, which had been designed to track submarines, fails to reach orbit after launch and disperses its highly radioactive two pound plutonium power source over a wide area as it breaks up re-entering the atmosphere.
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