Uncommon Ambience: At the Movies, Caddyshack. Country club early morning ambience. You are amongst the well-kept grounds, and here is the sun peaking over the area flora. Water is hurling spastically. The birds are turbo-charged. Off in the distance, someone is tending to the greens of Hole 6.
This week’s episode focuses on the first forty-five seconds of Caddyshack. Before the mayhem and the gopher. Before Kenny Loggin’s guitar.
Caddyshack opens with a brief moment of intoxicating calm. A sea of stars suddenly swirl with ethereal voices. The voices aren’t speaking language; they are just calling out, chanting, as the stars become a logo for Orion Pictures.
And then we open to our own star rising above the Bushwood County Club. Water spurtting all about. And now a maraca is accompanying the chants.
It’s a lovely forty-five seconds. And the focus of this episode. Eight hours of blissful morning grounds upkeep (don’t sweat the continuity issues). And no worries about being bullied out by rich people. Or threatened by a scary groundskeeper.
This is pre-golf bliss.
Can I go back for a second? Watch the star animation for Orion Pictures. The stars so fluidly decouple their constellation and form a circle. Yet the anchor point placement for the circling stars winds up clumsily rotating like a wagon wheel. I recognize how hard the effect must have been to accomplish in the eighties. But y'all nailed the rest of the animation, why botch it on the finale?
Finally, the chanting voices. You won't find them in this weeks episode because copyrights and whatever — but if you would like to experience them in a different context, J Dilla gives the chants a starring role in “Milk Money.”
Photo used in this week's movie poster graphic by Thomas Ward (Pexels).