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.
1937—The Hindenburg Explodes
In the U.S, at Lakehurst, New Jersey, the German zeppelin LZ 129 Hindenburg catches fire and is incinerated within a minute while attempting to dock in windy conditions after a trans-Atlantic crossing. The disaster, which kills thirty-six people, becomes the subject of spectacular newsreel coverage, photographs, and most famously, Herbert Morrison's recorded radio eyewitness report from the landing field. But for all the witnesses and speculation, the actual cause of the fire remains unknown. 1921—Chanel No. 5 Debuts
Gabrielle Bonheur "Coco" Chanel, the pioneering French fashion designer whose modernist philosophy, menswear-inspired styles, and pursuit of expensive simplicity made her an important figure in 20th-century fashion, introduces the perfume Chanel No. 5, which to this day remains one of the world's most legendary and best selling fragrances. 1961—First American Reaches Space
Three weeks after Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to fly into space, U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard completes a sub-orbit of fifteen minutes, returns to Earth, and is rescued from his Mercury 3 capsule in the Atlantic Ocean. Shepard made several more trips into space, even commanding a mission at age 47, and was eventually awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor. 1953—Hemingway Wins Pulitzer
American author Ernest Hemingway, who had already written such literary classics as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novella The Old Man and the Sea, the story of an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. 1970—Mass Shooting at Kent State
In the U.S., Ohio National Guard troops, who had been sent to Kent State University after disturbances in the city of Kent the weekend before, open fire on a group of unarmed students, killing four and wounding nine. Some of the students had been protesting the United States' invasion of Cambodia, but others had been walking nearby or observing from a distance. The incident triggered a mass protest of four million college students nationwide, and eight of the guardsmen were indicted by a grand jury, but charges against all of them were eventually dismissed.
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