"Into the distance, and into memory:
We will never see their like again."
Robert Youngson, Filmmaker
Laurel and
Hardy Central is a
frames
site. Although
frames have fallen out of
favor
on the Internet, we still feel it is the best way to
present our
material.
Click a button on the left-hand menu, and a page pops up in the main
frame.
Simple, easy and effective. Now, about that left-hand menu...
MENU
Laurel and Hardy Central is divided
into
several
sections, each with its own special flavor (but we're out of
gooseberry).
INTRODUCTORY STUFF
- Welcome (Home Page): - The first
page you will see
when
you visit..
Here is where we feature news, quick links to our gift shops and
special
Laurel and Hardy items for sale through our site, and our legal
mumbo-jumbo
stuff.
- Site Guide: What you are looking
at now.
- Articles - We list our
"Articles"
section as part
of
our introductory
stuff, as people who may not know who Laurel and Hardy can get a
fine
education from reading all the articles and essays we have on our
site.
We started out with a dual biography of the Boys by John Larrabee and a
look at the music of Laurel and Hardy films by John V. Brennan. (If you
don't know who these two Johns on, take our word for it, they fine,
upstanding
guys.) We have since expanded with several new essays, mostly by
our readers, covering films, history, personal memories, thoughts on
"The
Boys" themselves.
THE FILM REVIEWS
This is the heart of our site.
We devote
a full page to to each and every film Laurel and Hardy made
together.
Most of the individual pages have our personal commentary on the film
in
question, and in the case of the films that are lost to history, we
still
provide as much information about the film as we feel necessary.
The films are divided into four categories:
- The Silents - The short
films Laurel and Hardy
made before
the Dawn of Sound.
- The Sound Shorts - The short
films Laurel and Hardy
made once "the
talkies" were here to stay.
- Feature Films - The longer films
Laurel and Hardy
made.
- Ephemera - One of our favorite
words, it means
"something of short life or of a transitory nature". For some
reason, we use this word to describe appearances by Laurel and Hardy in
other
people's films and in other media besides
motion pictures.
- If you see this symbol:
in any of our film reviews, it means we also have a review of a DVD on
which this film appears. Clicking on the DVD symbol will take you
to our DVD review.
THE HAL ROACH WING (Re-opening soon)
The Hal Roach Wing was our first
major
addition
to the site. Though it is fully integrated into our main site, we
call it a "wing" because it is not devoted to Laurel and Hardy but
rather
to Hal Roach, the man who produced most of their films. And not
only
to Mr. Roach, but to those people who worked under him on the Laurel
and
Hardy films. We have the Laurel and Hardy Stock Company Hall of
Fame,
which is devoted to our favorite Laurel and Hardy co-stars. We also
feature
articles on some of Roach's other famous comedians, such as Charley
Chase
and Our Gang (aka The Little Rascals).
THE LHC MUSEUM (Closed for Renovation)
The Laurel and Hardy Central
Museum was
our second major addition to the site. Again, it is fully
integrated
into the main site. We wanted a place where visitors to this site
could share pictures of Laurel and Hardy memorabilia. In the
Museum,
we present several virtual walls with framed pictures of
memorabilia.
Each picture opens up to a fresh browser window with a much fuller
picture
of the item(s) and some information about it/them. We hope to
expand
this section often, as often as people send us interesting pictures of
fun Laurel and Hardy stuff.
THE FUN FACTORY (Re-opening Soon)
The Fun Factory is a catch-all for
many
standalone
sections of our site. You can find pictures, DVD
reviews,
FAQs, fun facts about the Boys and book
reviews. Check it out. It's... well.... fun!
GIFT SHOPPES
Our third major addition to the
site.
For
several years, we kept this site completely non-commercial. But
when
Hallmark released their first Laurel and Hardy DVD in America, we
decided
to offer it through an association with Amazon. Once we did that,
we figured that people might be looking for other stuff too. So
we
opened up several Gift Shoppes, devoted to DVDs, books, VHS tapes and
Compact
Disc.
We also decided to offer posters
through an
affiliation with AllPosters. So if you are looking for that
special
present to offer a loved one, you can browse through our shops.
OTHER MENU ITEMS
On our lefthand menu, we also include a
separate
link
to our Links page, where you can find links (duh!) to many other pages
about Laurel and Hardy, as well as links to sites about other comedians
and movie-related things, as well as some of our own personal favorites
sites. You can also go to our Letters section, where you can read
what other people have written to us about. We also a handy
"Email
Us!" link so you can send us your thoughts no matter where you are on
our
site. There is a link to the Accolades section, which is a list
of
many nice things people have said about our site. We never get
tired
of that page.
Finally, there is a link to "Frames",
which
should
only be used if you happen to come to the Menu through a search engine
and are not seeing the whole site but just the menu. Although we
try to make each page on our site fully navigable to any other major
section
of the site, Laurel and Hardy Central is best seen as a frames-enabled
site. In our fully-framed site, the menu is on the left, and
individual
pages appear in the main section in the center.
NAVIGATING THE SITE
There are many ways to navigate this
site,
though
the easiest way is using the lefthand menu. On each individual
page,
there are buttons or links all over the place you can press, and they
will
always take you someplace. Film titles also serve as links in most of
the
film review pages, so that if you are reading the entry for Towed
in
a Hole and we happen to mention the film Hog Wild, you can
link
to that film automatically. If you are reading a review
and notice a film title that does NOT serve as a link to that film's
page, please let us know. For those of you who have java-enabled
browsers, we have added a
simple
menu to the bottom of very page on our site (or so we think), so if you
have come to an
individual page through a search engine, you can still find your way
around,
or link to our fully-framed site. If you ever get lost, look for
a button on the page that says "Go Back One":
(the above buttons are illustrations, and will
not lead you anyplace if you click on them)
These buttons,
found ubiquitously on our site, usually near the bottom of the page,
will
take you back one page in whatever section you happen to be in.
Click
these buttons enough and you will eventually reach an alternate Main
Menu,
at which point you have reached the outer edge of the site itself and
cannot
"go back" anymore.
We have tried
to make sure every single page on this site (and there are currently
over
200 separate pages) leads back to a previous page or menu. And we have
also added a simple menu that should appear at the bottom of almost
every page
if your browser is Java-enabled.
If any link happens
to lead to a dead end, email us and let us know immediately and we will
fix it. Fixer-Uppers, that's what we are.
Anything that
we have not described here, you will have to explore for yourself. And
remember: Those not interested, do not answer.
THE TEDIOUS HISTORY OF THIS PAGE
Revised December 2004
By John B.
Okay... so there
we both wuz, in a fox hole. It was 1919. I was headin' over
the hill with
the rest of the division, while John L.stayed behind to guard our
post.
John L. sez to me, he sez, "If ya comes back, John B. we'll put a
Laurel and
Hardy
website together, you and me, kid." And I sez to him, I
sez, "
"Don't worry, John L. --- I'll be back... we'll all be
back!". Then I rushed over the hill... cannons to the left of
me... cannons to the right of me...
If only it were
that dramatic.
Here's the real
scoop, as I first wrote it many moons ago (with revisions here and
there
through the years):
I first met John
Larrabee online in 1995 or so, when he saw a post of mine in the Laurel
and Hardy Internet Newsgroup and e-mailed me a message about the
upcoming
Marx Brothers Newsgroup. I answered him back by saying something like
"I
can't wait until it is up, so that I can reveal my theory as to why A
NIGHT
AT THE OPERA is a better movie than DUCK SOUP." A few days later I got
another message from John L. inquiring as to what my theory was.
Well, I was cornered,
as I never actually developed a theory. I thought that on the Internet,
protected by the fortress of anonymnity, you could say anything you
wanted.
But "Chicago John" would have none of that. So my reply was basically
"It
just is 'cause I say so". I guess he must have liked that answer,
because
he never stopped sending me e-mails and I never stopped replying.
We met, as I said,
in a newsgroup that discussed Laurel and Hardy, but in our electronic
correspondence,
we very rarely talked about "The Boys". We did talk comedy, of course.
We spent weeks on Bob and Ray and decided they were probably the only
other
comedy team in history with the same eerie, God-given, Two Minds
without
a Single Thought chemistry as Stan and Ollie. And we talked music, and
while he theorized on why John Lennon's songs became less universal
after
he left the Beatles, I tried to convince him that Bob Dylan's work in
the
eighties and nineties was as good, if not better, than his work in the
sixties (even though, in my heart, I knew I was lying). He talked about
Ann-Margret, I responded with Winona Ryder. At the time we created this
page (Feb, 1998), we were also chatting about the movie TITANIC (John
L's
a a big boat buff), Woody Allen's life and art (love his art, not crazy
about his life), and why Teri Hatcher is such a Superbabe. (We both
love
LOIS AND CLARK and "She just is 'cause I say so!" was my theory on
Hatcher's
Superbabeness.)
But in the fall
of 1997, in the middle of a typically warm and funny letter where we
were
(finally) discussing Laurel and Hardy, John L. wrote this:
"Now then, how about this: let's
go through the L&H catalogue. The Roach sound films, anyway. What
the
hell, if we tackle about ten shorts per letter, we'll get through them
all in five or six letters. I'll start with the first ten, you can
offer
your typically scintillating follow-up commentary, then you can do the
next ten in your next letter, I'll comment on those and do the next
ten,
etc. etc. This will be fun, trust me..."
We started with Unaccustomed
as We Are (I liked it, he not so much) and we were off to the
races,
as they say. John soon realized, after the aforementioned five or six
letters,
that we had the beginnings of a nice web page, and that we should
include
the features and silent shorts in our discussions too.
John L. was a
teacher, and had a much better grasp of the nuances of the English
language
than did I (then I did? then did me?), so we mutually decided that he
would
do most of the writing as far as taking care of story capsules and
background
histories of the films. I had taught myself how to create
websites
by running my own humor page, so we mutually decided I would design and
code the site. Things began to fall into place and we realized
very
quickly that, hey kids, we could put on the Show right here on the
Internet!
Once we had closed
the book on every Laurel and Hardy film we had seen, which included all
of the Roach talkies, all of the later films, and a goodly amount of
the
silents, John frantically worked on writing an entry on each film. He
also
took the comments he and I made about each film and edited them into a
simulated dialogue meant to enlighten and possibly annoy fellow fans.
Whenever
he had finished ten or so films, he sent them to me, to turn into
aesthetically
pleasing, surfable HTML thingies. Later on, when we had finally
seen
all the silents, we added more reviews.
The result is
LAUREL AND HARDY CENTRAL (HARD BOILED EGGS AND NUTS), written and
developed
by two deeply devoted (and slightly off-kilter) fans of Stan Laurel and
Oliver Hardy.
We update LHC
periodically with new reviews, new or expanded sections or just
breaking
Laurel and Hardy news. Or sometimes just a note letting the world
know that we are still around and have not abandoned the page.
If you feel any
particular film has been neglected, or if you have any opinons pro or
con
about our page, you will drop us a line at lhcntrl@aol.com.
We enjoy e-mail, especially if you attach Ann-Margret or Teri Hatcher
pictures
to them. (Pix of Jennifer Aniston and Neve Campbell are acceptable
too. We're
very flexible in these matters.)
B.S. - You may
be wondering by now what is the official name of this site. Is it
LAUREL
AND HARDY CENTRAL or HARD BOILED EGGS AND NUTS? The answer is simple:
Neither
do I too.
B.S.S. - Some of our more recent
correspondence
(Winter/Spring 2005) included such diverse topics as Tom Hanks (again),
Bugs Bunny and the Warner Directors, Jay Leno versus David Letterman,
Mary Poppins versus The Wizard of Oz and, somewhere in there (as Kurt
Vonnegut
would say), a Jennifer Aniston reference in every letter.
Guaran-dam-teed or your money back.
As always, we are putting both of
our
Doctor of
Thinkology
degrees to good use.
--- John V. Brennan (alias John
B.)
Copyright © John Larrabee,
John V. Brennan 2004. All Rights Reserved.
(Hey, look - it's one of them "Go Back"
buttons!)
(this graphic never leads anywhere -
it's just a reminder of where you are)
