Movie: Magic Trip - Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place

Hey Howard, if you enjoyed the Wavy Gravy movie you should check out the movie on Kesey's cross-country trip aboard Further.

I've seen a documentary with probably much of the same archival material, but I surely will take a look for the DVD.

A friend told of a time he attended a party at Kesey's (back in the day). When he awoke, he was in the barn with a bunch of ducklings walking all over him. He said it took him a bit of time to figure out that it was real.

And he spent the next decades of his life teaching the young at the university.

Ah, yes. The days of legal acid.

For such a legendary cross-country journey -- comparable in popular myth to Homer's Odyssey -- when you see the actual footage they shot and the disconnected discombobulated disorganized mess it really was you realize that what they did isn't all that different from the thousands of kids that took off Greyhounding around the country in the '60s.

And it only took 12 days (June 17-29, 1964).

Now I'm going to have to re-read Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."

It's fun to know however that the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour was an (unsuccessful) attempt to recreate the wacky free-wheeling fun of Kesey's bus trip.

Although, supreme irony, a quote from the Boston Globe printed on the back cover of the DVD says, "it's the movie 'Yellow Submarine' should have been but didn't know how to be."  Apparently the Globe got their Beatles movies mixed up.

Even more interesting(?) the bus featured on the front cover is the 1990 recreation of the original Further, not the original 1939 International Harvester.

Even MORE interesting, now that I'm familiar with the two buses, much of the footage in the movie showing Further tooling around with crazy people waving from the top -- it's all the new bus.  Meaning it was shot AFTER 1990.

The directors' commentary, now that I'm watching it, mentions that some of the audio was dubbed in by actors reading transcripts of what was actually said, because the original was such poor quality and hadn't been synchronized with the video. This movie is vastly Hollywoodized, now that I get into it.