Its that time of year again. Yesterday, to mark the opening of deer season, we watched the classic big buck story, Escanaba in da Moonlight. This is the tale of how The Buckless Yooper got his buck. Yooper as in a person from Michigan's Upper Peninsula (U.P.).
The principals in this story are the Soady family along with their friend Jimmer Negamanee from Menominee, and a lost Department of Natural Resources (DNR) officer recently exiled from Detroit to Escanaba. The actors include Jeff Daniels, Harve Presnell, Joey Albright, Wayne David Parker, Randall Godwin, and Kimberly Guerrero.
We have both the regular DVD which is available from Amazon as well as the "making of" DVD, A Picture from Home: The Journey Through 'Escanaba in da Moonlight' which is available from Jeff Daniel's Purple Rose Films web site.
While watching this, my wife asked how old is Harve Presnell? So I looked him up on iMDB and found that he died this last summer at the age of 75 from pancreatic cancer.
This movie came out in the Spring of 2001 and played mostly in the Mid-West. It was released on VHS and DVD on 15 October 2002, at which time I ordered copies shipped to family all over the United States.
Looking back though my email archives, I note that Jimmer Negamanee looks quite a bit like one of the members of my Grandfather's survey crew from back when they laid out so many of the highways across the U.P. back in the late teens, early twenties.
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