I Married a Witch (1942)
🧙♀️Retrofit Walpurgisnacht Drive In
Deciding which witch to watch and when to watch it is the big question as we park our brooms for this week’s Retrofit Drive In. The reason for such a witch’s brew of choices is because of the big holiday. That’s right, April 30, is Walpurgis Night, or even more fun to say “Walpurgisnacht.” As they say on Wiki, not Wicca:
“An abbreviation of Saint Walpurgis Night (from the GermanSankt Walpurgisnacht[zaŋkt valˈpʊʁɡɪsˌnaxt]), also known as Saint Walpurga's Eve (alternatively spelled Saint Walburga's Eve), is the eve of the Christian feast day of Saint Walpurga, an 8th-century abbess in Francia, and is celebrated on the night of 30 April and the day of 1 May.This feast commemorates the canonization of Saint Walpurga and the movement of her relics to Eichstätt, both of which occurred on 1 May 870.”
Why Walpurgis Night never caught on in America is beyond me. Saint Walpurga was known to be all-in in the war on “pest, rabies and whooping cough, as well as against witchcraft.” It comes exactly 6 months after Halloween, a time when evil spirits are launched upon mankind.
They do their damndest for a half a year, then they go back into some sort of devilish hibernation. It’s a great time for a celebration! That’s what all those little dybbuks, demons, and goblins are doing around the giant devil guy in Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940) as Leopold Stokowski conducts Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain (1867).
For your Walpurgisnacht video feast, here’s a great wartime comedy starring Veronica Lake as a witch who was burned at the stake in 1672, a lightning bolt frees her blonde blithe spirit from a tree in 1942, just in time for with Jennifer to trick Frederic March, a descendant of the puritan who lit her up three centuries back. Lake herself is a work of magic, one of those individuals who could look contemporary in any time she might inhabit. She’s got the look. It’s witchcraft.
Chapter 7 of the 12-part The Phantom Empire comes with a convenient title “From Death to Life.” This week’s cartoon is something you might well have missed the first time around, but it is a hilarious take-off of The Blair Witch Project (1999) starring Scooby-Doo and the gang!
There are a couple of witchy bonuses, so keep scrolling. It’s not that scary and somehow beautiful witches, Gene Autry, Scooby Doo, Radiohead, and Elizabeth Montgomery in “Bewitched” feels like where we are at.
1st Witch: When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain? 2nd Witch: When the hurlyburly’s done, When the battle’s lost and won. —Macbeth (1606), Act I, Scene I, William Shakespeare
Feature: I MARRIED A WITCH (1942)
Serial: THE PHANTOM EMPIRE Chapter 7 “From Death to Life”
Cartoon: “THE SCOOBY DOO PROJECT” (1999)
Bonus: BEWITCHED Pilot Episode (1964)
Bonus: “Burn the Witch” Radiohead (2016)
Bonus: “Witchcraft” by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, sung by Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley on the TV special “Welcome Home Elvis” (1960)
