Block Buster!

"Block Buster!" (also sometimes listed as "Blockbuster!") is a 1973 single by The Sweet. Written by Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, and produced by Phil Wainman, "Block Buster!" was the band's sole UK No. 1 hit. Released in January 1973, it spent five weeks at the top of the UK Singles Chart, and also made #1 in the Netherlands, Germany, New Zealand, Austria and Ireland, and #3 in Finland, Switzerland, Denmark and Norway. Outside Europe it fared less well as it peaked at #29 in Australia and at #73 on the American Billboard Hot 100.

Music and lyrics

Its riff was considered markedly similar to fellow RCA act David Bowie's "The Jean Genie", released shortly before, but all parties maintain that this was pure coincidence.

TV performances

Some controversy rose after the band's performance of the song on the British television program Top of the Pops at December 25 1973. In this performance, Sweet's bassist Steve Priest wore a Swastika.

References

Blockbuster (book)

Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer is a 2004 non-fiction book by British film critic Tom Shone published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, ISBN 0-7432-6838-5.

Based on interviews with leading Hollywood filmmakers, actors and production staff it examines the revolution in Hollywood movies brought about by Jaws, Star Wars, Alien and other summer blockbusters and how they became a global phenomenon.

The tone and approach of the book is not one of film criticism as such but rather an analysis of how the blockbuster era came into being, and the processes which drove the producers, directors and film executives concerned from 1975 to 2004. It sets itself firmly on the side of the audience and values entertainment and thrills rather than high culture, and does not shy away from equating creative success with commercial success.

In the book Shone considers that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg's reinvention of blockbusters as fast-paced entertainment reinvigorated the American film industry and deserves greater artistic and critical recognition. These two filmmakers are the most prominent of the many interviewed for the book and receive the most coverage. Director James Cameron is also featured extensively but was not directly interviewed.

Blockbuster (entertainment)

Blockbuster, as applied to film, theatre, and sometimes also video games, denotes a very popular or successful, usually big budget production.

Origin of the term

In film, a number of terms were used to describe a hit. In the 1970s these included: "spectacular" (The Wall Street Journal), "super-grosser" (New York Times), and "super-blockbuster" (Variety). In 1975 the usage of "blockbuster" for films coalesced around Steven Spielberg's Jaws and became perceived as something new: a cultural phenomenon, a fast-paced exciting entertainment, almost a genre. Audiences interacted with such films, talked about them afterwards, and went back to see them again just for the thrill.

Blockbuster films

Before Jaws set box office records in the summer of 1975, successful films, such as Quo Vadis, The Ten Commandments, Gone With the Wind, and Ben-Hur, were called blockbusters based purely on the amount of money earned at the box office. Jaws is regarded as the first film of New Hollywood's "blockbuster era" with its current meaning, implying a film genre. It also consolidated the "summer blockbuster" trend, through which major film studios and distributors planned their entire annual marketing strategy around a big release by July 4.

Book

A book is a set of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of ink, paper, parchment, or other materials, fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is a leaf, and each side of a leaf is a page. A set of text-filled or illustrated pages produced in electronic format is known as an electronic book, or e-book.

Books may also refer to works of literature, or a main division of such a work. In library and information science, a book is called a monograph, to distinguish it from serial periodicals such as magazines, journals or newspapers. The body of all written works including books is literature. In novels and sometimes other types of books (for example, biographies), a book may be divided into several large sections, also called books (Book 1, Book 2, Book 3, and so on). An avid reader of books is a bibliophile or colloquially, bookworm.

A shop where books are bought and sold is a bookshop or bookstore. Books can also be borrowed from libraries. Google has estimated that as of 2010, approximately 130,000,000 unique titles had been published. In some wealthier nations, printed books are giving way to the usage of electronic or e-books, though sales of e-books declined in the first half of 2015.

Musical theatre

Musical theatre is a form of theatrical performance that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The story and emotional content of a musical – humor, pathos, love, anger – are communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an integrated whole. Although musical theatre overlaps with other theatrical forms like opera and dance, it may be distinguished by the equal importance given to the music as compared with the dialogue, movement and other elements. Since the early 20th century, musical theatre stage works have generally been called, simply, musicals.

Although music has been a part of dramatic presentations since ancient times, modern Western musical theatre emerged during the 19th century, with many structural elements established by the works of Gilbert and Sullivan in Britain and those of Harrigan and Hart in America. These were followed by the numerous Edwardian musical comedies and the musical theatre works of American creators like George M. Cohan. The Princess Theatre musicals and other smart shows like Of Thee I Sing (1931) were artistic steps forward beyond revues and other frothy entertainments of the early 20th century and led to such groundbreaking works as Show Boat (1927) and Oklahoma! (1943). Some of the most famous and iconic musicals through the decades that followed include West Side Story (1957), The Fantasticks (1960), Hair (1967), A Chorus Line (1975), Les Misérables (1985), The Phantom of the Opera (1986), Rent (1996), The Producers (2001) and Wicked (2003).

Bibliomancy

Bibliomancy is the use of books in divination. The method of employing sacred books (especially specific words and verses) for 'magical medicine', for removing negative entities, or for divination is widespread in many religions of the world.

Terminology

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word bibliomancy (etymologically from βιβλίον biblio- "books" and μαντεία -mancy "divination by means of") "divination by books, or by verses of the Bible" was first recorded in 1753 (Chambers' Cyclopædia). Sometimes this term is used synonymously with stichomancy (from στίχος sticho- "row, line, verse") "divination by lines of verse in books taken at hazard", which was first recorded ca. 1693 (Urquhart's Rabelais).

Bibliomancy compares with rhapsodomancy (from rhapsode "poem, song, ode") "divination by reading a random passage from a poem". A historical precedent was the ancient Roman practice of sortes ("sortilege, divination by drawing lots") which specialized into sortes Homericae, sortes Virgilianae, and sortes Sanctorum, using the texts of Homer, Virgil, and the Bible.