Archives

Nov052007

The Dancing Stormtrooper

My first day back at work went pretty much exactly as I anticipated: right back into the grind. No time to write a proper entry about the vacation, or even to catch up on all my blog-reading from last week. (I won’t tell you how many unread posts I had waiting in my aggregator. It’s too frightening. If I was wise, I’d just mark them all as read and start fresh in the morning. I never made any claims to wisdom, though.)

I did, however, stumble across this, which I will share with you now:

It’s our old friend Danny Choo, the Tokyo stormtrooper I’ve blogged about before, showing us some of his slick moves. I don’t know why I’m so amused by the sight of Imperial stormtroopers in everyday, terrestrial settings, unless it’s because the costumes — the good ones, anyway — look so real, literally like these guys just walked off a movie screen into our world. Star Trek-themed costumes, by contrast, very rarely look like the real thing — homemade Starfleet uniforms are usually just a little too obviously amateur jobs, latex Klingon foreheads don’t match the wearer’s skin tone, etc. But a guy (or gal) in one of these armor suits, well, they look the way they’re supposed to look. And it’s all the better when they’re dancing…

(Incidentally, I love the guy on the subway who is trying his darnedest not to look at the two-stepping lunatic in the white polystyrene Halloween outfit…)

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Nov042007

C’est La Vie

A mere 48 hours ago, I was holding hands with The Girlfriend and feeling very uncurmudgeonly as we watched Tinkerbell glide down from the Matterhorn amidst a shower of gold and blue fireworks.

Now I’m preparing to put my Krazy Kat out for the night so I can get to bed and be fresh for the morning’s return to the New Proofreader’s Cave deep in the bowels of… aw, to hell with it. You get the idea. My vacation is over and tomorrow it’s back to Real Life™. Sigh.

I’ve experienced this letdown many times, but it always seems to take me by surprise anyhow. I simply can’t believe how quickly something that you spend a year planning and gearing up for seems to ultimately pass. Almost as if it didn’t happen at all.

I find it utterly depressing that the moments of your life when you feel the most truly alive, the most truly yourself, the most engaged and interested and happy are so rare and short-lived. Don’t anyone try to lay that line on me about how this fleeting quality makes those moments all the more special, because I’m not sure I believe it. The truth is that I think it sucks major rocks that so much of our lives are composed of the mundane and soul-numbing. It seems like it shouldn’t have to be this way.

Sigh again. Sorry to be a drag… so, how was everybody’s week while I was away?

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Oct272007

All I Ever Wanted

Well, kids, this is it… my suitcase is sitting on the bed waiting to be stuffed, and in only a few hours, I’ll be breathing the sunny, ashen air of SoCal. (Those fires had great timing, didn’t they?) Play nice while I’m gone, remember to be excellent to each other, and Happy Halloween. Here’s a little something to remember me by:

Is it just me, or was Belinda Carlisle a lot hotter when she was chunky and using drugs than when she cleaned up and went solo? Maybe it’s me…

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Oct262007

Star Trek: Rebooted

star-trek-crew.jpg

As you may have heard, Paramount is hoping to revive its venerable — and highly profitable — Star Trek franchise with yet another feature-film adventure for the original Enterprise crew, i.e., Kirk, Spock, etc., only this time there will be a whole new gang of young actors playing the iconic characters. J.J. Abrams, the creator of Lost and Alias, is writing and directing, and the final member of the core cast was announced just last week. Here’s the run-down:

  • Chris Pine (Kirk)
  • Zachary Quinto (Spock)
  • Simon Pegg (Scotty)
  • Zoe Saldana (Nyota Uhura)
  • Karl Urban (Leonard “Bones” McCoy)
  • Anton Yelchin (Pavel Chekov)
  • John Cho (Sulu)

The photoshopped image above (courtesy of ScreenRant.com) provides an idea of how the newbies may look in their roles as well as how they compare to the original actors. As usual, give it a click it to blow it up larger.

In addition to the core cast above, Eric Bana will be playing a villain named Nero, who is rumored to be a Romulan (plausible, considering the name and the fact that the Romulan culture of the original Trek was modelled on ancient Rome), and Leonard Nimoy is said to be appearing as a more, ahem, mature Spock in a brief cameo. That last bit suggests we can expect either a time-travel story (another one? Ho-hum…) or a frame story of some kind, no doubt intended to help legitimize the new cast by having one of the classic actors “identify” them as his old friends.

Based on what I’ve seen out there on the blogs, people seem to be generally positive about this effort to reboot Star Trek, with opinions ranging from flat-out enthusiastic to cautiously optimistic. I, however, am far more dubious of the whole — forgive the pun — enterprise.

Continue Reading…

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Oct262007

Song in My Head

You ever wake up with a song already stuck in your head? Yeah… mine this morning is “My Head Hurts, My Feet Stink, and I Don’t Love Jesus,” by Jimmy Buffett. Make of that what you will…

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Oct232007

It Really Was a Different Time, Wasn’t It?

I’ve been looking for some video from Salvage 1 to try and refresh my memory. I didn’t find very much, but there is this:

Honestly, more of my circuits fired in response to the ABC Sunday Night Movie graphics than the footage from Salvage, the TV movie that became the series Salvage 1. Remember TV movies, kids? Or the days when feature films ran on regular network TV about a year after they’d been in the theaters, back in the dark days before home video rentals, cable TV, or “on-demand” anything? Can you believe there was once a time when you could make a movie about a homespun junk dealer with a preposterous notion about flying to the Moon in a rocket made out of a cement mixer and a tanker-truck trailer, and it would actually garner enough viewers to justify a weekly TV series (admittedly a short-lived one, but still…)
Yes, we were all a lot more innocent then…

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Oct232007

More Long-Lost Relics of My Youth Resurfacing?

I guess the old TV series Voyagers! must be selling reasonably well on DVD — either that, or studio execs are running out of product to release and still have a bunch of blank discs they want to burn — because the rumor mill says two more obscurities from the early ’80s, Salvage 1 and Tales of the Gold Monkey, may be coming next year. Of the two, I’d say Gold Monkey is more likely, if for no other reason than the opportunity to ride the coattails of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and maybe make a few more bucks than this series would on its own. For me, it’s also the more desirable of these two possibilities. (If you’ll recall, I wrote about Gold Monkey a while back; I always loved that show.)

As for Salvage 1, I remember watching it and can easily recall the basic premise — a post-Mayberry, pre-Matlock Andy Griffith builds a backyard rocket ship so he can go to the Moon and retrieve all the equipment left behind by the Apollo astronauts — but the details have gotten pretty hazy. I didn’t realize this show had enough of a fan base to support a DVD release, but I could be wrong.

The way things are going, I guess everything will become available for us crazy collector-types one of these days…

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Oct222007

The Night Belongs…

Finding that bizarre-o Budweiser commercial earlier got me thinking about some other ’80s-vintage beer ads that made quite an impact on me: Michelob’s “The Night Belongs To…” campaign comprised several atmospheric, one-minute-long masterpieces that featured music by actual rock stars instead of the usual generic advertising tracks. The best known of these was probably the one that featured Eric Clapton playing an updated version of his 1970 hit “After Midnight.”

Continue Reading…

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Oct222007

The Greatest Musical Beer Commercial with Pirates, Ever!

The Internet amazes me. Here we have a technology that is as revolutionary a means of storing and disseminating information as anything we’ve come up with in a couple of centuries, and what do we mostly use it for? Preserving the media detritus of our childhoods in the 1970s and ’80s. Case in point: I mentioned pirates in the previous entry, which started me thinking about other pirate-y things I have loved in the past, which called up a dusty old file somewhere in the adolescent stratum of my personal wetware memory bank (that’d be my brain, kids). I did a bit of searching on Ye Olde YouTube, and behold, a Budweiser commercial that I saw at some point in high school and which has remained lodged in my head ever since:

As best I can recall, this ad only ran during Friday Night Videos and other late-night programs, and I don’t remember that it ran for very long… a few weeks maybe. I’ve thought about it from time to time over the years, and tried to describe it to friends who have invariably responded with blank looks. But now, thanks to this wondrous, science-fiction thing we call the Internet, I can finally shout to the heavens, “You see? It did exist! I’m not mad! I’m not!”

Seriously, though, isn’t that a weird commercial? I don’t know about you guys, but it doesn’t make me want to go for a Budweiser… maybe go plunder some booty or something, but not drink beer.

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