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Johnny LaRue's Crane Shot
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Whatever Happened To..?
I was listening to a few cuts from this Donna Loren compilation album recently, which got me thinking about why she never became a big star. Donna was a child star of sorts, acting and singing on television while still in grade school. As she grew into a teenager, she signed a recording contract with Capitol and began appearing in small roles in the BEACH PARTY movies cranked out in the 1960's by executive producers Samuel Arkoff and James Nicholson and director William Asher at American International Pictures. Most of the time, Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello played the leading roles, but Donna, along with several other cuties, could be seen in the background and occasionally got a song of her one to perform. She also did a series of Dr. Pepper commercials, so someone was definitely grooming her for stardom.

What's evident from seeing her on-screen and listening to her music is that she was a very good performer (and cute as a button). I suppose it's hard to judge her acting from the small roles I've seen, including a guest spot as a sheik's daughter infatuated with Davy Jones on THE MONKEES, but she absolutely was a terrific singer. It may not be immediately obvious from titles like "Muscle Bustle" and "Beach Blanket Bingo," but she had a wonderful voice, and she was still just a teenager when she recorded them. I particularly like "It Only Hurts When I Cry," which she performed in the 1965 film BEACH BLANKET BINGO. Not to slight Annette Funicello, who also had a career headstart working for Walt Disney for many years before, but it's clear from watching the film that Loren had star presence that Annette, I don't think, ever did (maybe boys will be boys, but I believe Annette's notoriously prominent bustline had a lot to do with her success).

After a few more TV guest shots and a busted pilot with Aaron Spelling at ABC, Donna Loren retired from show business to get married. Not an unusual move for a budding ingenue, but she was only 21 years old, and it's a pity to think about the wonderful work she didn't allow herself to give to us. Maybe if her stardom had risen more quickly, she would have thought differently about giving it all up. At any rate, if you find yourself coming across BINGO or BIKINI BEACH or PAJAMA PARTY on cable or on DVD, Donna had solo spots in all of them, so stick with them long enough to catch her number. I think you'll be happy you did.

On a slightly related note, here's what I've been listening to on iTunes:
"Danger Man Theme"--The Red Price Combo
"Let Love Come Between Us"--James and Bobby Purify
"Batusi A Go Go"--Nelson Riddle
"Lonely Is the Summer"--The Debonairs
DAY OF THE ANIMALS radio spot
"Out of Tears"--Rolling Stones from VOODOO LOUNGE
"Gramaphone Man"--Spirit
"My Little Surfin' Woodie"--The Sunsets
"She's My Witch"--Kip Tyler
"Grand Ennui"--Michael Nesmith
Main Titles from DESERT OF FIRE--Franco Bixio
"The Throne Room/End Title"--John Williams from STAR WARS
"Songbird"--Fleetwood Mac
JUDD, FOR THE DEFENSE Theme--Alexander Courage
"Karma Sitar"--101 Strings
"Rockin' in the Free World"--Neil Young
"5D (Fifth Dimension)"--The Byrds
"Asshole"--Denis Leary from NO CURE FOR CANCER

Posted by Marty at 11:05 PM CDT
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Thursday, April 20, 2006
Feats Of Strength
I'm writing now, because I'm going into work a half-hour later today. It's okay--the boss knows...and I still might get there before he does. That's no slam. He was with us last night.

Last night, Chicken, Grady, Kellner, LD and I gathered at Moto's to move gigantic chunks of wood with our bare hands. It was sort of like a prison exercise, like George Kennedy made Newman do in COOL HAND LUKE. Moto had chopped down a huge tree in his back yard and cut it into pieces (well, more accurately, had it done), and we had to load the pieces into a truck and unload them out at the Kellner compound. This took two trips of lifting, carrying, dropping, etc. and involved much heaving and cursing. It really wasn't as bad as all that, I suppose. There was good teamwork, not much bitching. I have a few small scratches and scrapes on my arms; I was smart enough to wear gloves, but next time I'll do long sleeves. And the Motos grilled up a ton of burgers, dogs and brats, of which I had way too much (as was obvious when I had to leap out of bed and onto the growler at 3:15 this morning), but it was good stuff, Maynard. And, hey, I admit, it was good for me to do a bit of exercise too. Last night was fun, all things considered. I didn't get home 'til after 11:00 though. Took a shower, read a bit, and hit the hay. Had the windows open. It was good sleeping weather.

I forgot to tell you about the amazingly shitty movies Kevin (my B-Fest compadre) made me watch Sunday night. He brought over a bunch of tapes he had picked up at his local Family Video for $2 each or something like that. One was MULE FEATHERS, which is about as bad as they come. It's a PG slapstick comedy western starring Rory Calhoun as a conman who poses as a priest and carries on conversations using mental telepathy (!) with his donkey (!), who's voiced by Don Knotts. It's like a much stupider version of A BOY AND HIS DOG, but with no cannibalism. The post-synched sound makes it look really cheap, as does the fact that they only shoot the western town set from two angles. The comedy is leaden, the editing incomprehensible, and the sound effects juvenile. MULE FEATHERS was a tough 80 minutes.

After that was an episode of a Japanese TV series called SPECTREMAN, in which superhero Spectreman fought a giant flying whale. Spectreman seems like every other Japanese superhero, like Ultraman, in that he can grow to mammoth proportions, fly, shoot rays, etc. His powers are useless against the flying whale, though, and he discovers that his foe has a strange Corsican-brothers reaction to him. So to stop it, it does...nothing. Literally. He lays down on the beach and sends his homies to float over and drop a bomb down its blowhole. Unfortunately, Spectreman's arch enemies, a pair of cackling space monkeys (!) in a flying saucer, use the opportunity to literally kick the hero while he's down and can't fight back. The coolest thing about SPECTREMAN is its kickass theme song that reminded me of the SONS OF HERCULES theme.

I then pulled out CHAIN GANG WOMEN, which is the world's #1 bullshit title. There are no chain gang women, and no women at all until about 40 minutes in. It's not a bad little exploitation movie, really, but you could be forgiven for being disappointed by it.

We wrapped up with THAT WAS ROCK, a compilation of clips from the legendary THE T.A.M.I. SHOW and THE BIG TNT SHOW, neither of which are on DVD, presumably because of rights issues. Both were huge rock concerts staged in Los Angeles especially for film and featured virtually every major rock, pop and R&B act of the period, which was 1964 and 1965. Not all that performed made the THAT WAS ROCK tape, which featured new intros by Chuck Berry, but among the ones who did were the Rolling Stones, Ike and Tina Turner, a kickass James Brown, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, the Ronettes, Lesley Gore, Gerry and the Pacemakers and several others. The badassedness of these musical greats almost made up for Rory Calhoun talking to his ass. Almost.

Posted by Marty at 8:16 AM CDT
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Monday, April 17, 2006
Walk Tall And Carry A Big Stick


The cinematic saga of Buford Pusser began in the winter of 1973, when the now-defunct Cinerama Releasing Corporation released WALKING TALL, a crude, simplistic, violent R-rated drama about an ex-Marine and pro wrestler who returned to the Tennessee county of his childhood and single-handedly wiped out organized crime. Joe Don Baker played Pusser, who was elected sheriff of McNairy County after a severe beating by hoodlums left him scarred and near death. WALKING TALL struck a major chord with rural audiences, who turned it into one of the year’s most talked-about and financially successful films. Pusser planned to portray himself in the 1975 sequel, but he was killed in a mysterious auto accident, and 6’6” Bo Svenson was enlisted to play the lawman who “walks tall and carries a big stick” in two movies and a short-lived NBC television series.

WALKING TALL, the series, premiered the same month that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the 40th U.S. President, which may have been too soon. The Reagan administration’s black-and-white views on law and order were an influence on dozens of violent, high-octane Hollywood action movies, many of them starring macho men like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris. But when NBC debuted WALKING TALL on January 17, 1981, audiences were still in the sensitive grip of the Carter era and perhaps weren’t quite prepared for a single-minded law enforcer who eschewed the civil rights of the accused if they stood in the way of what he considered to be justice.

Svenson, a familiar face to TV audiences from schlocky TV-movies like GOLD OF THE AMAZON WOMEN and SNOWBEAST, probably felt right at home with Sheriff Buford Pusser’s badge and “pacifier” (his term for the hefty four-foot club he carried in the back seat of his police car) in hand again. The show’s premise was just like that of the WALKING TALL movies in which Svenson had starred. He again was a widower who lived in McNeal (changed from McNairy) County, Tennessee with his father Carl (Walter Barnes, taking over for Noah Beery and Forrest Tucker), son Michael and daughter Dwana. McNeal was a small rural community where everybody knew everybody else, which didn’t make it as difficult as you would think for some of its citizens to get into trouble with the law and run afoul of Buford’s temper.

NBC scheduled WALKING TALL for 8:00pm Central on Saturday nights. Its CBS rival, the shortlived FREEBIE AND THE BEAN (also an action-oriented spinoff of a successful film), was no competition, but both series were slammed in the ratings by THE LOVE BOAT, which formed a Saturday-night juggernaut with FANTASY ISLAND for several years on ABC. After five episodes, the show was pulled, only to reappear six weeks later at 9:00pm on Tuesdays, where another smash ABC series, HART TO HART, buried it, this time for good. Only seven episodes of WALKING TALL were made, and all of them are available on DVD from Columbia/Tri-Star. Because I believe that no TV series should be forgotten, what follows is a somewhat comprehensive WALKING TALL episode guide. Print it out and keep it next to your remote.

1) “The Killing of McNeal County’s Children”--Directed by Alf Kjellin. Written by Stephen Downing. Stars Robert Englund, Charles McDaniel, Eric Stoltz, Whit Bissell. Pusser investigates when two teenagers become brain-damaged after a few puffs of some powerful new PCP cigarettes. He threatens pusher Bobby Joe Wilson (Englund, later Freddy Krueger in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET) and is nearly killed when Wilson’s home lab explodes, but still fails to stop the ring led by oily businessman Oliver Moss (McDaniel). Even Buford’s environmentally dubious strategy of assaulting Moss’ trucks and dumping their chemical contents onto the highway makes little dent in the drug’s onslaught of the local high school. It gets personal after two classmates (one is played by future star Stoltz) drug Michael Pusser’s drink with angel dust, which leaves him perched on the school roof thinking he can fly.

2) “The Protectors of the People”--Directed by Daniel Haller. Written by Donald R. Boyle. Stars Charles Napier, Jesse Vint, William Windom, William Sanderson, Otis Young, Dey Young. One of WALKING TALL’s advantages is its weekly guest stars. Even if an episode doesn’t happen to be working too well, there’s always an interesting actor or two to keep an eye on. This episode may have the show’s best cast, and Boyle (the show’s executive story editor) gives them an incendiary topic to bite into. McNeal runs afoul of the Ku Klux Klan, mainly in the personage of vile Napier (the great character actor with the toothy grin), sadistic Sanderson (NEWHART) and store owner Vint (FORBIDDEN WORLD). In their repulsive desperation to make the county all-white, they attack a white teenage girl while disguised in blackface and then blow up a store owned by black businessman Otis Young (THE LAST DETAIL). It all gets terribly out of control when Pusser’s black deputy Aaron (Harold Sylvester) is framed for raping a white woman.

3) “Kidnapped”--Directed by John Florea. Written by Paul Savage. Stars Chuck Connors, Edward Albert. This episode could have been written for almost any other TV cop show. Its routine plot by GUNSMOKE veteran Savage has been done many times. Theo Brewster (Connors in a “special cameo appearance”) is shot by a guard during his commission of a bank robbery and taken into custody to Pusser’s jail, where he lies on life support. His sons--also his fellow bank robbers--plot to break him out by taking a local family and Buford’s father hostage.

4) “Hitman”--Directed by Alf Kjellin. Written by Robert E. Swanson. Stars Merlin Olsen, L.Q. Jones. Also not a terribly original concept, but strong direction, particularly during the final act, and good performances make the episode worthwhile. NBC sportscaster and former Los Angeles Ram Olsen, just a few months before starring in his own NBC drama, FATHER MURPHY, is Webb McClain, an old friend of Buford’s who returns to McNeal County to renew their relationship. Unbeknownst to Pusser, however, McClain is an assassin who has been hired by mobster Jones to murder Buford. Svenson and Olsen play the tension perfectly, giving the incredulous idea necessary weight.

5) “Company Town”--Directed by Harvey S. Laidman. Written by Lee Sheldon. Stars Ralph Bellamy, Lane Bradbury, Art Hindle, Claude Earl Jones. Leaving his regular supporting players behind, Pusser travels to a mining town to investigate the disappearance of a miner who had been riling his employers with talk about low wages and unsafe working conditions. Learning of other missing mining workers with similar rabblerousing backgrounds, Buford follows the trail of bodies all the way up to the mine’s owner, James Clausen (Bellamy), and his hot-headed son Stuart (Hindle).

6) “Deadly Impact”--Directed by Alexander Singer. Written by Gregory S. Dinallo. Stars Gail Strickland, Ken Swofford, Richard Herd, James Whitmore Jr. Credit director Singer and guest star Strickland for pulling off a late-in-the-game story twist that provides this episode with an effective dramatic punch. It smells like SILKWOOD when chemical plant employee Strickland suspects her boss of authorizing illegal dumps of toxic wastes into the nearby river. After she’s nearly run off the road, Pusser protects her from further attempts on her life by putting her up with Carl and the kids at his house, where his relationship with her turns from professional to personal.

7) “The Fire Within”--Directed by Phil Bondelli. Written by Lee Sheldon. Stars James MacArthur, Ed Nelson, Lance LeGault, Anthony Edwards, John McLiam, Richard Venture. MacArthur, a veteran of eleven seasons on HAWAII FIVE-0, exchanges his badge for a collar in this “special guest star” role as Father Adair, a new priest who takes the confession of a dying criminal. His vows prevent him from telling Pusser any information about what the man was involved with, namely a gunrunning operation masterminded by McNeal County real-estate agent Ed Campbell (Nelson). Look for future ER star Edwards as a horny teenager.

After WALKING TALL’s quick cancellation, star Svenson continued to rack up an army of television and film credits. Many of them were in exploitation movies such as NIGHT WARNING (in which he played a homophobic cop) and the Italian THUNDER WARRIOR (he also reunited with Charles Napier in the Fred Olen Ray ALIEN-ripoff DEEP SPACE), but his best TV performance of the era was a memorable turn in MAGNUM, P.I.’s third-season premiere as Ivan, a KGB agent who had tortured Thomas Magnum (Tom Selleck) in Vietnam and murdered Magnum’s friend Mac in Hawaii. The final confrontation between Magnum and Ivan was quite a corker and is probably the series’ finest moment. Svenson continues to be a popular supporting actor in low-budget movies and was tapped by Quentin Tarantino to portray a reverend in KILL BILL.

Brian Dennehy also played Buford Pusser in A REAL AMERICAN HERO, a CBS movie that aired in 1978, and The Rock starred in a 2004 WALKING TALL remake that had nearly nothing to do with the original films or the Buford Pusser legend. The seven one-hour television episodes on DVD are nothing like TV crime drama at its finest, but its realistic location shooting (all in Southern California, it appears), fine actors, sharp action scenes, and committed, passionate lead performance by Bo Svenson, who could usually be counted on for one deeply felt monologue per show, make it an appealing curiosity for cop-show fans.

Posted by Marty at 11:48 PM CDT
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Sunday, April 16, 2006
The Greatest Commercial In The History Of Television

Posted by Marty at 5:08 PM CDT
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Thursday, April 13, 2006
You Knew Somebody Was Going To Do It Eventually
Finally, the trailer for BROKEBACK TREK starring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy as lovers. I'm sure you're as tired of mock BROKEBACK trailers as I am, but I had to give this one a look, and it's actually pretty good. It's only about two minutes long, so give it a looksee.


I haven't mentioned in awhile what I've been reading. At the moment, I'm about 1/3 of the way through THE BLACK SHRIKE by Alistair MacLean. It's interesting so far, about a British agent who assigned to investigate the recent disappearance of some of the world's most preeminent scientists. All were traveling to Australia, but none arrived at their destination. So the hero and a female agent go undercover as husband and wife and are, presumably, waylaid by the same baddies responsible for the other kidnappings. At this point, the couple have escaped from their cell aboard a dank steamer ship and leapt into a stormy ocean, where they floated all night until miraculously washing adrift on a coral reef, which turned out, when the sun came up, to be near an island inhabited by an old British dude who, I'm betting, is involved with the original conspirators somehow.

I just finished MacLean's FEAR IS THE KEY, which I picked up before, but watched after, seeing the 1972 film adaptation. The movie, directed by Michael Tuchner and starring Barry Newman, John Vernon, Suzy Kendall, Dolph Sweet and Ben Kingsley, is surprisingly faithful to the novel with just a few relatively minor changes.

Before that, I read Brett Halliday's ARMED...DANGEROUS..., in which Miami private dick Michael Shayne goes undercover as a New York bank robber to bust a police corruption scheme, and DC Comics' SHOWCASE PRESENTS JONAH HEX, which is a 500-pages-and-more black-and-white collection of the first couple of dozen Jonah Hex comic book stories from the 1970's, all of which came from ALL-STAR WESTERN. Jonah Hex may be the most popular western character ever created specifically for comic books. As written by co-creator John Albano and later Michael Fleisher, who gave Hex a bit more depth, Jonah is a ruthless bounty hunter scarred physically and emotionally from his experiences fighting for the Confederates in the Civil War. Most of the stories are drawn by DC's stable of Filipino artists, including co-creator Tony DeZuniga, who give the character an appropriately bleak atmosphere. I hope DC releases more Jonah Hex in the SHOWCASE format, which is a thick book that sells for about $17--an excellent bargain.

What are you reading these days?

Posted by Marty at 11:31 PM CDT
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Wednesday, April 12, 2006
I Got A Beverage Here
According to the "Which Big Lebowski character are you?" quiz:




Why don't you check it out? Or we cut off your Johnson!


Posted by Marty at 8:40 AM CDT
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Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Star Trek 2.0
Goddamn it, can't they just leave STAR TREK alone? If G4 hates the show so much, why bother to air it?

I just caught a few minutes of STAR TREK 2.0, as the network calls it, on the G4 network. What they are doing is running STAR TREK reruns, but shrunken to postage-stamp size, and around the borders they're surrounding the image with...what exactly, I don't know. There's real time chat, which is displayed below the show, even though no one is chatting, and they just run the same comments over and over. On top is a "Pop-Up" type of caption that is frustratingly simplistic and apparently written by imbeciles. I swear to you that one read, "Sally Kellerman made her TV debut on The Outer Limits and she went on to appear in films and continues to work to this day." Also, the name "Mitchell" was misspelled "Micthell." Is that how G4 staffers write or is that how illiterate they believe their audience is?

The left border is taken up by the same dozen Trek Facts over and over that lists such witty items as the number of Torn Kirk Shirts, Spock Says "Illogical", and Uhura Touches Earpiece. On the right is the Spock Market. I have no idea what it is, but details are on G4's Web site.

Seriously, I don't know who the audience is for STAR TREK 2.0. If you're a TREK fan, you absolutely don't want to see the show surrounded with all this clutter and unnecessary sound effects. Hell, the image isn't even very good; the skin tones were purple-ish. And if you aren't inclined to watch STAR TREK, why would the chat room and Trek Facts elements entice you to try it? G4's programming decision makes no sense to me. The network clearly either doesn't like the show or has no faith in its ability to draw an audience, despite the fact that it's probably the most popular television series in the world.

The episode airing was "Where No Man Has Gone Before," which is the hour that sold the series to NBC and is so good that I was able to sit through about ten minutes of it. It holds up extremely well and Shatner is terrific in the climax, handling the action and dramatics like an expert series lead. The big fight at the end is marred by obvious stunt doubles, but that wasn't unusual for TREK, which oddly had trouble finding stuntmen that resembled its actors.

Don't watch the episode on G4 though. I'll stick to my DVDs.

Posted by Marty at 11:10 PM CDT
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We Call Him Sasquatch
Seeing this reminded me of the "dolls" that my brother and I used to have when we were kids. And, yeah, they were called dolls then; there was no such thing as an "action figure," as far as I remember.

Actually, I don't think we had the Bigfoot doll or the Oscar Goldman, but we did have the Six Million Dollar Man. You could roll up the skin on his arm and check out the bionics, and you could peer through the back of his head and through one of his bionic eyes.

THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN was one of my favorite shows beginning when I was about eight or so, but unlike other favorite shows from that period, I can still watch it without cringing. I recorded the entire run on the Sci-Fi Channel 8 or 9 years ago, and it still holds up, I think. As many adventure shows were back then, it was designed to appeal to both adults and children, at least at the beginning. Unlike today's network television, which is pretty much tailored for viewers aged 18 to 30. I can't think of anything on the air today that would have interested me at age 9, other than maybe 24, which is too complicated and violent for 9-year-olds.

One of the most important nights of my childhood was the episode in which Steve Austin (Lee Majors), the former astronaut with $6 million of taxpayer dough inside of him in the form of bionic parts that ratchet up his strength, speed and vision, threw down with none other than Bigfoot. Yep, the legendary forest-dwelling apeman was alive and well in the backwoods of California, discovered by Colonel Austin while investigating some missing scientists. You need to remember that the Bigfoot legend was very much in the public mind when this two-part episode, "The Secret of Bigfoot," was telecast in 1976. And, wow, there was nothing more thrilling than when the two powerful rivals went at it, jumping down hills, ripping trees out of the ground and using them as rams, throwing powerful punches. All, of course, in slow motion and aided by those classic "bionic" sound effects (NA-NA-NA-NA-NA) and Oliver Nelson's music.

Oh, and it gets better. Bigfoot isn't just Bigfoot. He's a robot. From outer space. How kickass is that? Yep, Bigfoot, which his alien masters call Sasquatch, was built as a servant and protector by a group of basically benevolent aliens whose experiments are endangering the lives of Earthlings. Luckily for Steve, one of them is the foxy Shalon (Stefanie Powers), and she really digs him.

I showed this two-parter to some younger friends of mine who grew up on MACGYVER and TRANSFORMERS, and it still haunts me that none of them was the least bit entertained by it. I count that night as a majestic Crappy Movie Night failure, and it still perplexes me. What is it about a bionic man and a robot alien Bigfoot fighting each other in a majestic California forest that they didn't like? I don't think I'll ever get over that. I mean, there's a lot of dumb stuff that I like that I completely understand why nobody else likes. But Steve Austin vs. Sasquatch? That's fucking cool, dude.

Why isn't THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN (or its spinoff, THE BIONIC WOMAN) on DVD yet? Beats me. Universal has been very aggressive in releasing its '70s TV shows, including COLUMBO, DRAGNET, ADAM-12, THE ROCKFORD FILES, EMERGENCY, MCCLOUD and more. I believe that THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN would sell better than most of those shows, besides ROCKFORD and COLUMBO, so I can't imagine what the holdup is. I've been meaning to go through those old videotapes of mine and dub them to DVD-R, but I've only managed a couple so far. Obviously, those Sci-Fi versions are cut, time-compressed and/or feature shrunken credits, so they aren't optimal viewing. But I guess it's all I have for now.

Posted by Marty at 10:30 PM CDT
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YouTube Back In Action
So go watch that BILLY JACK clip, Tolemite!

Posted by Marty at 9:59 PM CDT
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Sunday, April 9, 2006
Temporarily Out Of Order
YouTube is down temporarily, so if you want to see any of the videos imbedded on my site (and who wouldn't?), just hold tight.

Posted by Marty at 3:17 PM CDT
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