Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
Rick Retro’s Realm, Behind the Scenes #29: Little changes here and there.
Have you heard the term “continuous improvement”? It’s a buzzword (buzzphrase?) from commercial industry meaning that you are trying to continuously improve. We all strive to improve… continuously. (Sheesh, I sound like Kamala Harris!)
Anyhow. Yeah, I do try to always get better. So in view of that, I make changes from time to time. Some are one-time deals, like fixing a mistake. Some are “going-forward” propositions, like “From now on, I will…” Both types of changes are in play in this post, but first, some news:
Welcome, New Subscribers!
As some of you know, Rick Retro’s Realm started out as a text group with just a couple handfuls of family and friends of mine. So I could test the waters, so to speak. It went well, and now three months later, here I am in my second month posting on Substack. And that means new subscribers, people I’ve never met in person. As of this week, Retro Movie Reviews now has more than twice as many readers who have discovered our Realm on Substack as those half-dozen or so who transferred over from the text group. It’s still not what one would describe as a horde, but it’s growth. 🤩
So welcome to all the recent subscriptions! Whether you are new or from the text group, I’d like us to get to know each other, so introductions are in order. In the comments, tell us your name, what part of the world you are commenting from, and a movie or two that are favorites of yours, not necessarily top favorites, just whatever you feel inclined to share with us right now.
Many of our subscribers have Substacks of their own, so please click on their publication link in the comments, and check out their work!
Do you have friends who would enjoy being part of our community? Invite them to join us also!
A Schedule Mistake
Bonus points to any reader who noticed that my last review, Being There, showed up a day late according to the updated Itinerary posted recently. The mistake was in the schedule. I posted that review four days after posting The Muppet Movie, as intended all along, but the scheduled dates of several reviews were wrong, since I somehow counted only three days to Being There, and then the next several dates were off by a day. The Itinerary is all fixed now. Today’s review should be out in a few hours from now, but I’m cutting it close by writing this post, so it could actually be a day late for reals. (Edit: Yes, expect the review of Airplane! (1980) tomorrow, March 22)
A Small Fix
After posting my review of Being There, well, Mrs. Retro wanted to watch it, so I watched it with her, for my second viewing in just a few days. When you watch a movie twice in a short time, you notice things that you missed the first time. In this case I noticed it was our second straight movie, beginning with The Muppet Movie, that had a cameo from Caroll Spinney as Sesame Street’s Big Bird. So I updated the post “Dark Whimsy Favorites: The Actors and Actresses” to reflect that discovery.
A Shorter “About” Page
The page “About” Retro Movie Reviews needs improvement. I removed the paragraph about Rick Retro (me) and left in the rest about the content of Retro Movie Reviews. I’m still learning about optimal use Substack and I think the page still needs to be better, but that’s a start.
A Tweaked Dark Whimsy Scale
I didn’t like that the current formula for determining the overall Dark Whimsy Scale reading was only capable of spitting out a very few decimal values between integer scores. So I fixed that. Now I use a matrix instead of a formula. I’ve explained it briefly in the third paragraph here.
This tweak changed the overall DW reading in four reviews:
The Wizard of Oz (1939) from 10.2 to 10.4
The Love Bug (1968) from 10.2 to 10.4
The Sting (1973) from 8.3 to 8.4
The Muppet Movie (1979) from 10.6 to 10.8
A Few Less Pictures
There’s a doctrine called “Fair Use” that allows movie reviewers limited usage of copyrighted still images from the movie being reviewed. But how that fair use is defined is up to the determination of the court system, something one wants to avoid. I’ve spent a few hours researching the topic, and have decided that going forward, it’s prudent to use a bit fewer images than I have been. I also plan to caption them, to show how they relate to the writing and add a copyright attribution to the copyright owner (as far as I know). When I find time, I will probably go back and tidy up some past reviews in this respect too.
A Few More E-mailed Posts
I’ve been working in stealth mode in the background to add to this website the reviews that were previously posted only to the text group. It takes an hour or two to get each one Substack ready, so I do it as I have extra time. Up to now, I’ve added fifteen that you can already find in the Reviews section, or our Archive, and Reviews #16 to #43 remain to be added. I didn’t send them out via email, since most of my early Substack subscribers were also in the text group. But now that over two-thirds of subscribers have never seen those reviews before, unless there are objections to this plan in the comments, I will send them out by email, and then backdate those reviews after publication. This means that between the Dark Whimsy Favorites we’ve been visiting, you will see some Christmas reviews from last December hit your in-box. Even though they are out of season, I hope you will enjoy them.
Thanks for your support.
Keep the comments coming!
Last updated 2025-03-21
I'm Rick's brother Jeff, now living in Greenville, South Carolina.
Some of my favorite movies are Beauty and the Beast, Inception, Les Miserables (2012), and Life Is Beautiful (which I believe is coming soon in the Rick Retro review schedule).
Rick Retro here near the Los Angeles harbor in Southern California.
I've been reviewing a lot of personal favorites for you with more to come, but a couple of big favorites that aren't on my current review schedule are The Last of the Mohicans and The Prestige.