Simple Tricks and Nonsense

Just lately, I've been working my way through Season One of the old TV series Vega$ on DVD. If you don't remember it, Vega$ -- not to be confused with the more recent James Caan series Las Vegas -- was an early entry in the private-detective genre that dominated prime time during much of the 1980s, running for three seasons from 1978 to '81. The show was created by Michael Mann, who would later become the driving force behind Miami Vice, and his pilot script suggested Vega$ could have been a stylish series with enough grit to allow some serious storytelling and character development, but without getting too heavy. Unfortunately, Mann's influence was quickly swamped by executive producer Aaron Spelling's trademark glitz, superficiality, and penchant for the ridiculous. For example, a typical episode from the first season involved an unscrupulous land developer trying to scare a retired madame off her property by -- get this -- sending a gorilla to threaten her. Or more precisely, a guy in a ratty-looking gorilla suit, like the ones Hawkeye and Trapper wore when they wanted to annoy Frank Burns. Yeah, it's a pretty bad show, even by the admittedly looser standards of the time.

(In case you're wondering, I was never a fan, not even back in the day; in fact, I don't recall ever watching it at all. The only reason it even pinged my radar is because the lead character drove a red 1957 Ford Thunderbird like my dad's. I picked up the DVDs out of curiosity, and to get a look at that car, and now I'm watching with the same sick "I cannot look away" fascination I feel when I see some white-trash loser getting busted for huffing paint on COPS.)

Believe it or not, though, my purpose here really isn't to rip on Vega$ for simply being what it was, namely a product of the Spelling cheese factory. After all, it ran in the time slot following Charlie's Angels, so what else could it have been but a big old pile of Kraft singles? No, what I'm interested in discussing is how eerily similar Vega$ was to another detective series, a much more respected and beloved series, a series that was starting production right around the time Vega$ was winding down: Magnum, PI. The two shows are so similar, in fact, that I think you can make a pretty good argument that Magnum, better though it might have been, was something of a Vega$ rip-off. Consider the following:

Continue reading "A Curious Case of Parallelism" »

Posted by at 6:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So did you hear about that fabulous, multi-million-dollar celebrity wedding happening this weekend? What? Chelsea who? No, no, I'm talking about Lisa Simpson! One of my Facebook friends pointed out that today is the big day for Bart's little sis:

Holy crap, does time fly. Seems like only yesterday we were living in a world without wristwatch communicators, picture phones, and humanoid robots whose heads spontaneously burst into flame and melt down like cheap candles in front of a blowtorch. Hey, wait a minute...

(Seriously, it does give me a strange feeling to think that the real-world calendar has caught up to one of The Simpsons' "future episodes," which seemed so funny and so far away when they first aired. I imagine the cognitive dissonance I'll be experiencing five years from now -- 2015 was, of course, Doc and Marty's destination at the end of Back to the Future -- will probably leave me in a corner of the room, rocking back and forth and muttering to myself about parallel dimensions and curves in the spacetime continuum...)

Posted by at 3:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I took a walk earlier, from my office over to my credit union, and along the way, I happened to spot a handbill pasted to a lamppost. It was typical for this sort of thing: a homemade, Xerox'd advertisement for a band I've never heard of, scheduled to play at a club I'd never set foot in, the sort of ad I see a dozen times a week and never pay any mind to. This one, however, caught my attention because I recognized the photo the band had used, no doubt with a great deal of irony and private amusement on their part. It was, in fact, this photo here:

This is a publicity still from a short-lived TV series called The Powers of Matthew Star, circa 1982 or thereabouts, about an alien prince from a besieged world, hiding out here on Earth in the guise of a typical teenage boy. Who just happens to have telekinetic superpowers with which he helps out the people around him, of course. I suspect that 99.99999% of the rest of the world has completely forgotten this show, if in fact anyone ever knew about it to begin with. Probably Louis Gossett, Jr., doesn't even remember this show, and he was in the damn thing. But I remember it. Because I'm me.

This is my gift. And my curse.

Incidentally, I ganked that image up there from this site, a pretty nifty project in which somebody is scanning and commenting on old issues of Starlog magazine. I always loved Starlog, the best source of sci-fi and fantasy news for decades before this whole InterWeb thing came along. I still have quite a few back issues down in the archives. Including the one with the article about The Powers of Matthew Star.

It's okay, I'm frightened, too...

Posted by at 5:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

SamuraiFrog reminds us that yesterday, May 16, was the 20th anniversary of Muppet-master Jim Henson's sad and far-too-early death. Twenty years since that spooky day when my entire university campus seemed to fall into a deep depression. Few individuals have that kind of effect on an entire generation. And the thing I admire so much about Jim is that he did it with nothing more than whimsy and sly humor, and the imagination to turn feathers and foam and random bits of stuff into characters that still seem to live and breathe in our collective consciousness.

Still... twenty years? I'm really having a hard time wrapping my mind around that one!

Incidentally, the photo above is one I ran across quite a while ago; I've been waiting for a good reason to post it, and this seems as good a time as any. I'm sorry to say I don't know who the man on Jim's left is; the gentleman to his right is, of course, Frank Oz, Jim's friend and co-conspirator during what I would call the "golden age" of The Muppets: the pre-Elmo Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, and The Muppet Movie. It seems to me that Frank, like Dan Ackroyd after Belushi, lost some minuscule but crucial animating spark after Jim's death. Perhaps that's presumptuous of me, considering I don't know the man, but that is nevertheless the sense I get when he talks about the old days.

I think a lot of us feel that way, actually...

Posted by at 9:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Astounding! Earlier in the week, I reported the DVD release date for the 1982-83 TV series Tales of the Gold Monkey; now this morning I read the even more unlikely news that Max Headroom is on its way as well!

Although I'm sure most children of the '80s will remember Max from the Coke and New Coke commercials of the day, the series Max Headroom had nothing to do with those, aside from the character of Max himself. Based on a British made-for-TV movie called Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future, the American-made series followed the adventures of Edison Carter, an investigative journalist living in a near-future dystopia entirely dominated by massive corporations and television. When Carter gets a little too close to uncovering his employers' nasty secret, they attempt to download his brain and create a virtual replica of their top-rated news personality so they can eliminate the troublesome original. The experiment doesn't quite succeed, and a smart-mouthed AI named Max Headroom is born!

Max Headroom was a trippy show, a biting satire of consumerism and mass media wrapped up in a tissue of futuristic ideas that wouldn't penetrate the consciousness of mainstream audiences for another 10 or 15 years. (I'm not ashamed to admit that I didn't fully comprehend some aspects of it myself.) Weirdly prescient in a lot of ways, and just plain weird in a lot of others, the show failed to find much of an audience, and it lasted less than a single season. Nevertheless, it made an impact on those who liked it; I don't think it's a stretch to call it a minor landmark in the history of science fiction, and certainly in the pop culture of the 1980s. I can't begin to imagine how well it holds up today, but I'm excited to add it to my collection.

The press release doesn't mention anything about possible extra features on the DVDs -- I'd love to have those old Coke ads at least, and ideally the complete 20 Minutes into the Future movie -- but the way these things go, I'll count myself lucky just to have the series itself.

The release date for this set is August 10. I ought to be finished with Gold Monkey by then, so that will be just about perfect...

Update: I've just remembered that I already wrote about Max Headroom a couple years ago, when I posted the show's opening credits as part of my TV Title Sequences series. It appears that the embedded video in that previous entry has been removed by the copyright Nazis; for your viewing pleasure, here is another version:

Posted by at 9:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I've just learned that Tales of the Gold Monkey, one of the "holy grails" of my misspent youth, will get its official DVD release on June 8. You can read the details here, if you've a mind to.

It looks like it's going to be a nicely done set, with a 36-minute retrospective documentary (rare for these old television shows), a number of photo galleries and episode commentaries, and a collectible booklet. That's impressive treatment for a series that lasted only one season way back in 1982! And I even like the package art, which is usually a big weak spot for TV-show DVDs. Although I do have to admit that the Gold Monkey artwork looks a lot like what was done for the Young Indiana Jones series; I guess Gold Monkey never will manage to shake off that particular association, will it?

In any event, this makes me irrationally happy... the last week or so has been pretty crappy, for reasons that will be revealed shortly, and this little jolt of good news is welcome distraction indeed.

Oh, and if you have no idea what the hell I'm even talking about, I've previously written about Tales of the Gold Monkey here and here.

Posted by at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not much to say, I just really liked this photo I spotted over at SamuraiFrog's place.

It amazes me how alive The Muppets, and especially Kermit, still seem to me, even after all these years, and even when I'm looking at a picture that ought to shatter any remaining illusion that these things are anything but a cloth tube -- a decorated sock, really -- with a human being's hand up the bottom. And yet, looking at this all-too-recognizable pose, this reminder that a gentle man and an insanely creative artist left us way before his time, brings a lump to my throat because, for just a moment, I know exactly what that silly cloth frog is "feeling."

I miss him, too, Kermie... we all do.

Posted by at 5:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

And this is pretty much how I feel about that:

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Posted by at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

When I was a kid, the Salt Lake television market boasted a number of locally made shows for children. For the toddler set, there was Romper Room with Miss Julie on KSL. When I was older, I enjoyed the old Flash Gordon serials and nautical-themed silliness on KSTU's Lighthouse 20. And when I was in grade school, my favorite part of weekday mornings was Hotel Balderdash on KTVX, channel 4.

Hotel Balderdash was primarily a forum for running old cartoons, but there were also live-action framing segments that were set in the titular hotel and featured a pair of Laurel-and-Hardy-type characters named Harvey and Cannonball. Guess which one was the fat guy?

Anyhow, as I said, the big draw for Balderdash was the cartoons, which were mostly Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies with the occasional Popeye thrown in for good measure. But these weren't the same Looney Tunes you saw on the Saturday morning Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show. These were whatever cartoons a small-time station located in a little backwater state called Utah could afford, which meant the old stuff. The really old stuff. A lot of stuff involving characters without names and caricatures of Hollywood stars who'd been dead for 20 years before I ever saw them. Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck turned up from time to time, but they were the early, off-model versions, the ones where Bugs had short ears and acted, well, looney instead his more familiar cocky self. I never liked those much, but at least they were better than the cartoons starring Sniffles the Mouse.

Sniffles was one of Chuck Jones' early attempts at creating an animated star for Warner Bros. With his oversized head, girly-sounding voice, and sappy-sweet manner, he was far too cutesy for my tastes, even when I was a kid. Apparently I wasn't the only one who felt that way, since Sniffles appeared in only 12 cartoons between 1939 and 1946 before he dropped into obscurity. And Hotel Balderdash ran them all. Frequently. I remember my heart shrinking a little bit inside every time one of them came on. They were things to be endured until Popeye or proto-Bugs came along to restore my spirits. All of them, that is, except Bedtime for Sniffles, the one where Sniffles tries his damnedest to stay awake on Christmas Eve so he can see Santa Claus. For some reason, I liked that one, especially when it actually ran near Christmastime (it wasn't unusual to see this one in July; Balderdash ran what they had available, regardless of whether it was season-appropriate). I think I enjoyed the gags involving the human-sized "furnishings" of Sniffles' home, and the music, and the general tone of the piece. I think. I honestly can't say now, roughly 35 years later, what the appeal was.

I found myself thinking of this cartoon as I drove home about an hour ago, through streets that were eerily barren of life. I was surprised to find it in its entirety on YouTube. And here it is, for anyone who may be dumb enough to be sitting up in the wee hours of Christmas morning, like I am:

To any of my Loyal Readers who may be out there, Merry Christmas. Let's get to bed, shall we?

Posted by at 1:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The last few entries have been a little on the grim and/or grouchy side, so why don't we try a nice, pleasant meme? The meme fad seems to be in decline these days, but SamuraiFrog somehow continues to stumble across them; here's one I spotted over at his place a few days ago, which he called the "Child of (Too Much) TV meme."

It's a long list of TV-show titles, to which you are supposed to do the following:

Rules:
- Bold all of the following TV shows of which you’ve ever seen 3 or more episodes in your lifetime.
- Italicize a show if you’re positive you’ve seen every episode of it.

Me being me, I shall of course add the occasional comment as we go along. Shall we begin?

Continue reading "Child of (Too Much) TV Meme" »

Posted by at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

It's been just over two years since I noted a rumor that the old TV series Tales of the Gold Monkey might be headed for DVD, and now -- finally! -- it looks like it's actually happening. TV Shows on DVD.com reports that the series is now available in the UK and Australia, and an American release is planned for sometime in the spring of 2010. Even better -- and quite surprising, given that this series lasted only a single year and is nothing more than a cult classic at best -- it's going to include an all-new retrospective documentary and recent interviews with the series' stars, Stephen Collins and Caitlin O'Heaney, and there may be some other special features from the European release as well.

I can't tell you all how happy this makes me. As I've explained before, Gold Monkey made a huge impression on me back in the day. If you're not familiar with it, it's a good old-fashioned adventure story about a dashing American cargo pilot and a cast of eccentric characters who live and work in the exotic South Pacific of the late 1930s. Coming on the heels of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which had been released the previous year, the series was marketed (rather inaccurately, in my opinion) and dismissed (rather unfairly, I think) as nothing more than an Indiana Jones knock-off, but it was a fun show in its own right and deserved more of an audience than it got. I picked up a VHS bootleg of the series several years ago and was very pleased at how enjoyable it still was. You always run the risk when revisiting childhood favorites of discovering that they weren't what you remember them being; happily, Gold Monkey was pretty much exactly what I remembered. The bootlegs, however, weren't worth the tape they were recorded on. They appeared to be 10th-generation copies with such a bad picture that I often couldn't tell what I was looking at, so I imagine viewing a nice clean DVD version is going to be like seeing the show for the first time. I can't wait...

In a somewhat related note, I see that the '80s detective series Matt Houston, in which Lee Horsley of The Sword and the Sorcerer played a Texas oil millionaire who solved mysteries as a hobby, may also be coming soon. Which means that pretty much every TV series that's ever mattered to me is or shortly will be available for me to own, except for The Wonder Years and the originally aired version of WKRP in Cincinnati, both MIA because of costly music licensing issues. Oh, and The Six Million Dollar Man; I have no idea what's holding that one up. I have to admit, it's a strange thing to consider, so much of my childhood being out there on the market now. It's kind of sad in a way, like a long quest is at last coming to an end...

Posted by at 1:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

By some strange confluence of historical currents, there seems to be a number of noteworthy anniversaries happening within days of each other this week. The most significant, of course, is the fall of the Berlin Wall on this very night 20 years ago, when ordinary Germans took matters into their own hands -- literally, considering they went after the Wall with hammers, crowbars, and even their fingers -- and put an end to one of the most powerful symbols of Cold War tension and communist repression, while border guards and secret police stood by and let it happen without firing a shot.

Continue reading "Anniversaries of Note" »

Posted by at 10:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Here's something I was planning to throw into one of those Halloween entries I mentioned earlier, since it's based on a publicity still from the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I figured vampires and slayers and Halloween go hand-in-fang and all. But really, it's the sort of gag that plays at any time of year:

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Yeah, who among us has not been in that uncomfortable position while in the company of some pretty young thing? I sympathize, Giles, I sympathize...

Posted by at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, that Castle/Firefly meta-joke I was looking forward to? Every bit as brilliant and funny as I hoped, from the rapid-cut "gearing up" and familiar Malcolm Reynolds action-hero pose to Castle's daughter puncturing his balloon with her teenagery command of the obvious:

I loved this whole sequence. I do find myself wondering, however, if any Firefly fans took the "get over it" line as a slight; browncoats seem to take a lot of crap in certain corners of the InterWebs for making such a fuss over a series that lasted only 13 episodes. Personally, I doubt it was intended that way, but fans can be notoriously touchy, as William Shatner learned with his own "get over it" joke. Hopefully, we all learned something from that ugly incident...

Posted by at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The TV series Castle is about the only thing running these days that demands "must-see" status for me. It's admittedly a trifle, but truthfully that's why I like it so much. I'm really damn sick of all the scripted dramas with no sense of humor and a grim, clenched-tooth fascination with how sucky everything is. A lighthearted 1980s-style detective show is the perfect antidote to all that self-importance.

Anyhow, because of our conflicting schedules and mutual interest in the show, The Girlfriend and I usually record it and then catch up on each week's episode a few days after it airs. We watched this week's episode on Tuesday. It was a good one that tied up some dangling threads from earlier segments (I suspect this would've been the show's finale if it hadn't been picked up recently for a full second season), but what really made us both sit up and notice was the preview of the next episode.

I caught it first, a glimpse of something familiar...

"Hey," I said, "Does that look like Nathan's Firefly coat?"

"It sure looked like a duster to me," Anne replied. "You don't think...?"

"Well, it is the Halloween episode. Maybe Castle is dressing up as... Mal?"

And then we both started grinning because it was so obvious, so likely, and so damn cool.

See, the star of Castle, Nathan Fillion, played the dashing space captain Malcom "Mal" Reynolds on the short-lived and much-lamented series Firefly. And Fillion is well-aware that much of his fanbase -- and Castle's, too, I suspect -- is composed of Firefly "browncoats." Because of this, I'm certain, every episode of Castle to date has had some kind of little shout-out to the science-fiction lovers who have stuck by him through several prematurely canceled ventures and are now delighted to see him in something that seems to be working. And what do you think would be the ultimate shout-out? Well, how about... this?

If you don't recognize the outfit, I'll confirm it for you: Fillion is wearing the complete Mal costume, right down to the really big gun. This is really a brilliant meta-joke... and considering how even that lousy cell-phone photo has plastered a big, big grin on my face, I can't wait to see how it works in the full episode.

Props to the always-interesting Adventureblog for spotting this...

Posted by at 1:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Remember that DVD-on-demand service I mentioned a few months ago, the Warner Archive? You may recall that I was very stoked by the idea of made-to-order obscurities, and couldn't wait to try it out. Well, as it happens, I apparently could wait, because I never got around to ordering anything from the Archive. The truth is, none of the titles made available to date have been "must-have" enough for me to pull the trigger. But that situation has finally changed. The TV Shows on DVD blog is reporting that Warner just added to the line-up three made-for-the-boob-tube movies from the early '70s: Genesis II, Planet Earth, and Man from Atlantis.

Continue reading "More Items for My Never-Ending Shopping List" »

Posted by at 10:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Reading the Sunday funnies yesterday brought me to an important moment of self-realization.

No, really.

You see, yesterday's edition of "Get Fuzzy" turned on a disparaging reference to the TV sitcom Two and a Half Men, a series that seems to be deeply loathed by a not-insignificant number of people. I like it, myself; it's not remotely deep, but I find it is consistently laugh-out-loud funny, at least to my sensibilities, and I'm frankly baffled by the level of ire I often see directed at this amiable -- if admittedly crass -- little show.

So I was thinking all of these things about Two and a Half Men and suddenly it struck me.

OMG... I like crap.

The things the sophisticates, connoisseurs, intellectuals, and hipsters generally decry as lowbrow, superficial, or -- how I have come to loathe this word! -- cheesy are often the things I most enjoy. And in turn the things that make them gush with enthusiasm and sweet, sticky joy tend to leave me, well, unimpressed. Consider the evidence:

Continue reading "I Like Crap" »

Posted by at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I've been working today on a little project that's led to me rediscover some music from deep in my CD collection that I've not listened to in a very long while. One of those albums is Songs from Ally McBeal, a soundtrack comprising mostly covers of 1960s pop tunes, with a few original tracks, all performed by the lovely Vonda Shepard. I'm finding that I still enjoy this music as much, if not a little more, than I did when it was current; Vonda has a warm and powerful voice, and her arrangements of old chestnuts are interestingly different from the familiar versions. Also, the whole album has a kind of pleasantly melancholy feel that's very agreeable to me as I putter around the house.

But here's the weird thing: I cannot for the life of me recall any specifics about the TV show these songs are from. I used to watch Ally McBeal pretty regularly, too, and it seems like I was as emotionally invested in it as in any program I follow. But I'll be damned if I can summon up the plot of a single episode, or any character names beyond Ally herself, or much of anything really, aside from a few faces and that spooky CG baby that popped up from time to time. How is it possible that I still remember specific scenes and even lines of dialogue from shows I saw once when I was 12, but a series that's only 10 years or so old has become a complete blank for me? And does this phenomenon say more about my mental state or the series itself?

Posted by at 5:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Hey, kids... sorry for the long silence, for which I was thoroughly excoriated in an email from one of you netcrap-cravin' Loyal Readers earlier today. To explain, I was out of town for a couple of days this weekend. Before that, I was preparing to go out of town. After that, I was recovering from being out of town. You get the idea.

I'm afraid I still don't have too much to offer my poor audience this afternoon, but since some of you are apparently feeling abandoned -- again, my apologies -- here's a neat-o self-portrait of what I would've looked like if I'd been an agency proofreader about 45 years ago:

Not too different, really, although I haven't worn a tie in years. If I had to wear a tie to work, though, a skinny vintage one with a cool diamond design would be just the ticket.

I built this little amusement at MadMenYourself.com, a promotional site for the AMC television series Mad Men. I don't have cable myself, so I've been unable to follow the show on any kind of regular basis, but I have caught a few episodes and, I have to admit, my day job is frighteningly similar to what you see on this series, just with less smoking and lunchtime drinking. Well, less smoking anyhow...

I found the link to the MadMen-izer via my friend Karen. If you go over there, make sure you have your speakers or headphones on so you can soak in the lounge-tastic background music...

Posted by at 5:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I still want to address the passing of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, but given the big subject matter earlier this week, I am hesitant to turn this into the "all obituaries, all the time" blog. Besides, I'm not really in the mood right now to talk about losing more of the familiar trappings of my youth. So instead, I'm going to offer up another item I've been meaning to post for a while, an image I spotted at Michael May's Adventureblog some time ago. It's probably a bit advanced for laypeople and casual geeks, but it certainly made me smile:

If you don't get it, start here, then proceed here. And if you still don't think this is funny after doing your research, well, then, I can't help you.

Posted by at 1:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Yeah, sure, the City of Angels suffers from atrocious traffic, smoggy air, and a surplus of shallow, pretty people -- and this is different from Salt Lake how? -- but for a TV and movie lover like myself, the place also offers endless amusements that my home town simply can't compete with. Like, for instance, a classic movie theater running a triple-feature of 1970s-vintage Battlestar Galactica movies this Saturday.

Darth Mojo has the details, but, in a nutshell, Universal Studios once tried to recoup some of the costs of the original Galactica by releasing several theatrical movies that were composed of edited episodes from the series and its bastard stepchild, Galactica 1980 (I shudder just typing those words...). According to Mojo, this will be the first time all three of these movies have been shown on the big screen in this country. Damn, how I'd like to be there! If nothing else, it'd just be cool to see in person that awesome Cylon graphic on the gorgeous old marquee shown above.

The theater that's hosting this triple-threat, American Cinematheque's Aero in Santa Monica, apparently shows mostly classic films; browsing over its current schedule, I think I'd probably be spending a lot of time there if I lived in the area...

Posted by at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

...about David Carradine, I'd like to share a photo I ran across while I was searching for an image to include with the "In Memoriam" entry. It didn't suit my purposes for that -- I wanted something specific to Kung Fu, not just a portrait -- but I nevertheless thought this was a cool picture:

Incidentally, is it just me, or did Carradine have a striking resemblance to John Carpenter, the director of so many iconic B-movies of the '70s and '80s?

What do you think, long-lost brothers? Or is it just the "weather-beaten old guy with long gray hair and a cigarette" effect?

Posted by at 11:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So did anybody catch this week's CSI? The murder-victim-of-the-week was an arrogant guy who'd produced a new version of a beloved 40-year-old science fiction TV show called Astro Quest (any resemblance to an actual beloved 40-year-old science fiction TV show with a similar name is purely intentional). Seems there were a lot of potential suspects because this guy's "redux" was so poorly received by the fans of the original. Where the original had been "antiseptic," "brightly lighted," and populated by noble characters that "ordinary people couldn't possibly live up to," AQ Redux turned out to be dark and grungy-looking, with angsty, sweaty, deeply flawed, and horribly unlikable characters. The producer justified this as "more realistic," but the fans who saw his preview reel in a convention setting responded by rioting.

Obviously, the writers of this episode have been thinking about the upcoming remake of Star Trek, but, in an in-joke I'm sure they thought was terribly clever, the fan who starts the riot by shouting "You suck!" was none other than Ron Moore, the executive producer and primary creative force behind the reimagined Battlestar Galactica. In other words, a guy who did in real life exactly what the fictional producer in the CSI episode had done. It was a cute moment for those in the know, but I find myself trying to decide just what was being said here. In other words, at whose expense was this joke made? Is Moore (or at least the writers of CSI) acknowledging that fans of older properties are justified in being unhappy with "gritty" remakes? Or were they slamming grumbly old-school types like myself as buffoons?

Honestly, I think you could make either argument. The episode does include a scene in which one of the regular characters explains to another why fans get upset when people tamper with the things that matter to them, but that same scene also features some dismissive remarks about that behavior. The episode itself closes on a rather sweet note, with an homage to a well-remembered scene from Star Trek, er, Astro Quest, and the CSI crew planning a marathon viewing of the classic show. So I guess you could see it as trying to present an even-handed view of the whole phenomenon, at least as far as is necessary to tell the weekly procedural story. But, while I acknowledge I'm probably too touchy about these things, I can't help but feel like, yet again, the people like me -- who prefer the "cheesy" and "campy" (god, I hate those adjectives!) originals to the slick-but-depressing modern versions -- are being dissed.

You damn kids can keep your edgy shit. I assure you it will one day seem as archaic as the stuff where Starbuck is a guy and the captain's shirt is weak around the shoulder seams. In the meantime, I think it's really just a matter of taste. As far as I'm concerned, real life is edgy, gritty, and angsty enough. I prefer heroes I can aspire to over tragic, uncertain trainwrecks...

Posted by at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After three TV-oriented entries in a row, my loyal readers can be forgiven for thinking I've given up on any pretense of an actual life, but I want to mention that The Girlfriend and I have really been enjoying the new series Castle. It's basically a throwback to the '80s-vintage detective shows I grew up on, somewhat similar to Moonlighting, only without the smug self-awareness that so often came across as less clever than irritating.

Nathan Fillion of the late, lamented Firefly plays Rick Castle, a very successful writer of crime novels who, as the series begins, has just killed off the protagonist of his best-selling series in a fit of creative boredom. Chance brings him into contact with NYPD Detective Kate Beckett when she comes to him for consultation on a murder case that appears to have been inspired by one of his books. Inspired himself by Beckett, Castle pulls a few strings and becomes her unlikely (and unwilling, on her part) partner. Ostensibly tagging along on Beckett's cases in the name of "research," Castle naturally starts helping her solve bizarre murders by working out the "plot" of the mystery.

Honestly, the mysteries are probably the weakest aspect of Castle, but they always were on the classic detective shows I loved in the '80s, too. Like Magnum or Simon & Simon, the real pleasure comes from watching the likable characters interact with one another. Fillion is perfectly cast as a flirtatious, wisecracking man-child, spoiled by fame and a seemingly bottomless bank account that allows him to pretty much get away with anything; as the show progresses, however, he's started to demonstrate that there's a good and even noble man lurking under the smart-ass exterior. Stana Katic as Beckett has been a little more difficult to like, a little tougher to see as anything but a straight man to Castle's nonsense, but she's starting to reveal some interesting depths as well, and she and Fillion have an enjoyable chemistry.

My favorite relationship on the show, however, is between Castle and his teenage daughter Alexis, played by newcomer Molly C. Quinn. Predictably, she's characterized as the mature counterpoint to Castle's childish behavior, but the two actors bounce off each other with such comfort and good timing that they appear to be a real father-daughter pair.

One final element that has endeared the show to me: each episode appears to contain a single geeky in-joke. So far, I've caught references to Highlander, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Land of the Lost, and I imagine there are probably others that I didn't notice. I can only assume these are intended as Easter eggs for Fillion's Firefly peeps, but whatever the reason for them, I like...

Castle is on ABC on Monday nights. Check your local listings, as they say. And let's hope this show gets more of a chance than Firefly or Fillion's last network series Drive, which was ignominiously canned by Fox -- of course! -- after only four episodes. Too bad, too, as I thought that one had potential...

Posted by at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I haven't watched ER on any kind of regular basis for years. I started losing interest after Dr. Mark Greene -- wonderfully played by Anthony Edwards of Top Gun fame -- died of a brain tumor in Season Eight, leaving Noah Wyle's Dr. John Carter as the only remnant of the show's original cast. Nothing against any of the actors who rotated into County General as the old folks left, but I just never found any of the newer characters as compelling as the first group. Also, while the really over-the-top "event" episodes were still in the future (I think... it's hard to recall quite what happened when, considering I haven't seen many of these episodes in years), the show was already evolving toward sensationalistic (and frequently ridiculous) sweeps-week plotlines and a tangled soap-opera-esque preoccupation with who was hooking up with whom in between patients. (Honestly, was there any woman around that hospital that Luka didn't have a go at? Maybe Kerri Weaver, but that's only because she turned out to be a lesbian...)

And yet, I never did give up entirely on the show. I kept tuning in from time to time, even after I'd reached the point of not knowing the names of any of the characters anymore, and I was thinking of them only as "John Stamos," "the Rock and Roll Kid," "Red-head Dude with the Beard," and "Cute Nurse with the Big Watchband." Oh, and, of course, Neela, whose name stuck because I thought she was a babe. I guess I took the show for granted; I always knew that if I couldn't think of anything better to occupy my attention on Thursday nights around 9 PM, well, there was always ER.

Continue reading "Hanging Up the Stethoscope" »

Posted by at 3:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Yesterday over on Facebook, I was tagged by Kelly -- better known in these parts as Jaquandor -- to do a meme about my life as a geek. I of course complied immediately, because, well, it's a meme. I'm reposting the results here, with some tweaks to the formatting and a few comments that I've reconsidered:

Continue reading "Geek Life Meme" »

Posted by at 4:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As you all know, I'm no fan of Ron Moore's reimagined Battlestar Galactica series. I honestly did try to appreciate it on its own terms, but it just never hooked me and I gave up on it midway through the first season. Still, I have followed some of the online commentary about the show over the years, and I was curious today to see how things wrapped up in the series finale last Friday night.

Apparently, aspects of the conclusion left a lot of people scratching their heads. From what I gather, the show ended with the ragtag fugitive fleet arriving at Earth -- our Earth -- some 150,000 years ago, and discovering the place inhabited by spear-carrying hunter-gatherers. The weary colonials ultimately decide to abandon their ships and technology and blend in with the primitives on the planet below. Some of the comments I'm seeing out there question this, as well as Starbuck's ultimate fate and the revelation of, for lack of a better word, "angels" who were overseeing, and perhaps guiding, everything. A recurring sentiment seems to be "what the hell was that all about?"

Well, this aging fan of the much-disparaged 1978 version of BSG is chuckling his head off right now, because these elements are all right out of the original series. Recall the opening prologue from the original: "There are those who believe that life here began out there... far across the universe with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Toltecs... or the Mayans... or the Egyptians..." By "going native," Ron Moore's colonials are simply living up to the "ancient astronaut" underpinnings of Glen Larson's Galactica.

The angels and Starbuck turning out to be some kind of spirit-being who knows the way to Earth have their precedents in the original, as well. In the original-series episode, "The War of the Gods," the Dirk Benedict version of Starbuck, along with Apollo and Sheba, encounter the Ship of Light and the highly advanced beings who dwell within it, angels, for lack of a better word, who declare that they are watching out for their "younger brothers and sisters." They seem especially interested in Starbuck, and tell him that, "as you are, we once were; as we are, you may one day become." When he and his companions return to the Galactica, they bring with them subliminal impressions of Earth's location. Sounds to me like Ron Moore was perhaps a little more faithful to the original series than I -- and the young fans of the new version who've always been so nasty about the old one -- really understood.

Now, as I said, I didn't watch the new BSG, so it's possible I'm completely misinterpreting what I've been reading about the finale. But I gotta tell you, I'm feeling some degree of vindication right now. I think I'm going to celebrate by cracking open a bottle of fine ambrosia and seeing if I can rustle up some mushies...

Posted by at 9:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

And now for the cinematic/video portion of tonight's program:

Continue reading "2008 Media Wrap-Up: Movies" »

Posted by at 2:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If I was embarrassed by the level of my own geekery on display in the previous entry, than this one is going to be downright mortifying. Still, it made me laugh, so I figured it was worth passing on, although you'll have to be something of a geek yourself to see the humor:

This is a clip from a BBC sketch comedy show called Dead Ringers. I'm not familiar with it, but they certainly live up to the name in this piece. The guy playing the Fourth Doctor especially amazes me; he doesn't particularly look like Tom Baker, but the voice and, my god, the laugh are uncanny. Good stuff!

My thanks to SamuraiFrog, who is pretty uncanny himself in his ability to find stuff like this...

Posted by at 6:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

In case you haven't noticed, I devote a lot of my energies around this place to memorializing, eulogizing, or otherwise trying to recapture, through whatever magic my words may posses, the recent past: the pre-digital, pre-Internet, pre-adult-responsibility (for me, anyhow) era of the 1970s and '80s. But sometimes words just aren't up to the task. Sometimes a little visual aid is helpful. So, for those whippersnappers in the audience who never knew The Way Things Used to Be and for you older folks who still pine for 1985 -- you know you do, just admit it! -- allow me to present BetaMaXmas.

This fun little website runs YouTube clips of old Christmas specials, holiday-themed episodes of '80s-vintage sitcoms (watch for a mulleted George Clooney on The Facts of Life!), and appropriate vintage commercials and music videos, all of which would be entertaining enough on its own. But what makes BetaMaXmas a real treasure is the cleaver virtual environment, which you can see in the screengrab above. Yes, kids, that's really what the world used to look like: tacky wood-veneer paneling, ugly upholstery, a TV screen smaller than the window on a modern microwave oven, and of course the rabbit-ear antennae that make a snowy picture, um, somewhat less snowy. (You can even manipulate the rabbit-ears, for the full old-tymey effect!) The Star Wars poster peeking out from behind the Christmas tree is an especially nice touch, I thought, and don't neglect to click on the copy of TV Guide up in the corner.

And now if you'll excuse me, a Very Special Episode of Alf is about to begin, so I'm going to pour myself some 'nog and put my feet up...

(Via Boing Boing, of course.)

Posted by at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, I read in Variety last week that ABC and Warner Bros. are planning to remake V, the classic '80s TV mini-series about extra-terrestrial Visitors who aren't what they appear to be taking over the Earth in an allegorical retelling of the rise of the Nazism.

I'm sure my three loyal readers can guess what I think of that idea.

Continue reading "At the Stopping Point" »

Posted by at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

SamuraiFrog reminds us that today is Jim Henson's birthday... he would've been 72 if he were still here. Strange to think of him that old, even stranger to think he's been gone for nearly 20 years (according to the wikipedia, he died on May 16, 1990).

Continue reading "Happy Birthday, Jim" »

Posted by at 9:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

A few months ago, I stumbled across a blogger called Darth Mojo, who is an Emmy award-winning VFX artist for the remake version of Battlestar Galactica. My loyal readers know that I'm not a fan of Ron Moore's take on one of my favorite childhood TV shows -- I tried to like it, I really did, but in the end, it just wasn't for me. Nevertheless, Mojo is an engaging writer who loves all kind of sci-fi stuff and is rightfully proud of his work on several of the landmark SF series of the past couple of decades. I'm interested in visual effects and often find his behind-the-scenes perspective fascinating, especially when he's telling stories from the earlier days of his career when he worked on Babylon 5, among other shows. But the thing that really endears this guy to me is that, even though he's an integral part of the new Galactica, he unabashedly loves the old Galactica as well... so much so that he accepted his Emmy while wearing an original-series Colonial Warrior uniform. Now that's my kind of nerd.

Anyway, today Mojo reminds us that this is a very special date for his fellow geeky kids of the 1970s: on this date thirty years ago, September 17, 1978, the original Battlestar Galactica premiered on ABC-TV as a three-hour telefilm called "Saga of a Star World." (Don't ask, I'm a fan and I don't even know what that title means.) To celebrate, he's posted a really nifty downloadable image of the classic establishing shot so often seen on the old show, as re-created by his colleague Lee Stringer. (Stringer worked on the Neo-Galactica miniseries and first season of the regular series, and is, according to Mojo, "the second biggest Battlestar fan on the planet." I assume from the context that he's talking about the old series.)

Mojo also invites his readers to share their memories of the old series in the comments on his blog entry. I quickly dashed off something over there, but I'd like to expand a bit on those remarks:

Continue reading "Thirty Yahrens Aboard That Ragtag Fugitive Fleet" »

Posted by at 2:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Like any other couple who have been together long enough to drop our camouflage shields and start showing our true, obnoxious selves, The Girlfriend and I tend to disagree pretty frequently on what constitutes good television. My picks tend toward PBS documentary series like Nova and The American Experience, old TV shows, and movies. Anne, on the other hand, is into all the do-it-yourself, makeover, and "slice of life" reality shows that clog up the basic cable channels. Which means that about nine times out of ten, when I show up at her apartment, the tube is set on TLC or The Food Network, and it's all I can do to keep from groaning out loud. (To be fair, she has much the same reaction when I run across an old Godzilla flick and settle in for a blissful evening of daikaiju silliness...)

Anyway, there is one basic-cable show that manages to cross party lines, appealing to both of us more or less equally with its mixture of travel, nostalgia, and greasy-spoon cuisine and culture, a Food Network program called Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. The set-up is that the host -- a boisterous Gen-Xer like ourselves called Guy Fieri -- drives around the country in a classic Camaro, stopping into, well, diners, drive-ins, and dives to sample regional food favorites and give a little history about the featured establishments. It's a fun show; a half-hour episode typically covers three quirky, mom-n-pop-style locations, and the eps are often themed in some way, like all family-owned diners, or places that are open 24/7.

The show's website includes a feature called "Tell Guy Where To Go," and not too long ago, The GF and I had some fun coming up with a list of our favorite Salt Lake-area places we thought the show ought to visit. We never got around to submitting our list, but it turns out we didn't have to: Guy was here last week, filming segments for the new season, and as it turns out, the places he visited match our list almost exactly:

Continue reading "Salt Lake's Diners, Drive-ins and Dives" »

Posted by at 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Via Chris Roberson, here's an awesome piece of art by a guy named Dusty Abell that probably won't mean a damn thing to any of the younger folks out there in InternetLand, but ought to bring a smile to the faces of all us aging thirtysomethings.

In case you've forgotten (or never knew them), these are the heroes and villains of all those great live-action TV adventures that used to alternate with cartoons on Saturday mornings back in the '70s. Children's television back then was blissfully un-self-conscious, utterly lacking in the cynical sense of irony, marketing potential, and self-aware references to other pop culture that infest today's kidvid stuff. It was also incredibly low-budget, heartbreakingly earnest, and broadly (i.e., poorly) acted. But it was wonderful stuff anyhow. Mostly fantasy or science fiction in nature, it stretched the imaginations of many a wide-eyed young viewer, and I didn't realize how much I missed these shows until just now. I feel sorry for modern-day kids; Saturday mornings these days just suck.

Click on the image to blow it up large and see how many of these characters you can name. The complete roster is below the fold...

Continue reading "Saturday Mornings Back in the Day" »

Posted by at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Oh, boy... what a conundrum...

You see, I loathe the "competitive reality show" phenomenon that has overtaken primetime television in recent years. Survivor and its highly contrived ilk long ago wore out their welcome for me and the American Idol-style talent shows alternately bore and irritate me. However, I reserve a particularly strong flame of hatred for the mind-numbingly stupid modern-day variants of the traditional quiz-show format. I think it's the way they all try to generate artificial suspense by having the contestants deliberate for ridiculously long periods of time (usually not very believably -- I mean, come on, how hard is it to answer the lowest difficulty level of these softball questions? Is the sky is blue or green? You honestly don't know that one? Well, then just pick one!) while ominous "the clock is ticking and which wire is Jack Bauer going to clip" music plays in the background. This technique was developed for Regis Philbin's thankfully deceased Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, but it endures in the even-more-annoying Deal or No Deal, in which contestants essentially play three-card monte by choosing from a range of metal attache cases in hopes that one of them will contain a cool million bucks. (The difference, of course, is that the contestants aren't betting their own money and so have nothing, really, to lose by just picking one, a scenario that makes the delayed-response thing even more obnoxious. It's not like Howie Mandel is pulling cash out of their wallets for every wrong choice they make!)

Needless to say, I don't watch Deal if I can possibly avoid it -- which is sometimes tricky, because my parents love the damn thing, so I have to be careful about when I choose to visit them -- but now an item on the Official Star Wars blog has piqued my curiosity... not to mention my prurient interests.

If you've never seen the show, part of Deal's schtick is that the attache cases that may or may not contain the million-dollar winnings (well, the cases actually contain cards with a dollar amount written on them) are held by 26 lovely female models, all wearing identical dresses (I believe they're usually red). But according to the Star Wars blog, an upcoming episode will have the Deal models dressed in the classic Princess Leia slave-girl outfit from Return of the Jedi, a.k.a., the "metal bikini." Can any loyal fanboy whose puberty was haunted by sail-barge fantasies resist that diabolical kind of lure? Especially when Vader, Chewie, R2-D2, and Carrie Fisher herself are also supposed to be on hand? I guess we'll find out...

(As an aside, I will admit that the idea of a Star Wars-themed episode did make me smile, even if I dislike the show, because it brings back a lot of fond memories of How Things Used to Be. Back in the late '70s, every variety show on the air, from The Muppet Show to Donny and Marie did an SW episode. It seems like strange timing to do one now, though; I've been thinking lately that SW in general, and the original trilogy in particular, is fading from the pop-cultural radar now that the prequels are complete. Perhaps Deal or No Deal skews heavily among people in my demographic?)

Posted by at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

To my knowledge, I've never really had a genuine, honest-to-gosh nemesis, but I'm beginning to think it just might be Matthew McConaughey. Yes, that Matthew McConaughey, the naked-bongo-playing goodtime-funboy with the perfect six-pack abs and the spotty box-office record.

And why, you may ask, would I elevate this inoffensively goofy would-be movie star to the level of "nemesis"? Well, first, he brought his special kind of blandness to Dirk Pitt, the literary swashbuckler whose adventures I devoured as a youth. Now, according to ScreenRant.com, he may be in line to transform another of my puberty-era heroes into one of his signature sleepy-eyed slacker doofuses (doofi?): Thomas Magnum, a.k.a. Magnum, P.I., the Ferrari-driving, Hawaii-based TV detective played in the 1980s by Tom Selleck.

Sigh.

Continue reading "Don't Eat the Snow in Hawaii" »

Posted by at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

For my own tribute to The Greatest Thespian of Our Time -- and I'm only being somewhat facetious here, because I honestly do think William Shatner is much better than most people give him credit for, at least when he's really trying and not just collecting a paycheck -- I'd like to present some of his finest moments in front of the camera.

Continue reading "A Shat Sampler" »

Posted by at 5:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Ah, the awful work day is over. Let's talk about something a bit more uplifting, shall we? How about television?

The late, lamented Futurama has always been something of a conundrum for me. It's a show I really wanted to like: an animated science fiction/comedy series created by the guy who brought us The Simpsons, a spoof of and loving homage to all the futuristicky space crap I've always loved, a niche thing that appeals only to a particular elite (read: cult) who actually recognize all the subtle nods to the big SF films and TV of the last 40 years. Oh, and it features the voice talents of the lovely Katey Sagal, a.k.a. Peggy Bundy from Married with Children, one of my guilty pleasures for years. How could I not love Futurama?

I don't know, but somehow I don't. The overall design of the show -- the look of the environment, the Galaxy Express spaceship, the characters -- amuses me, and I occasionally snicker at the sociopathic robot Bender or the frankly bizarre Dr. Zoidberg, but I don't very often laugh deeply, not the way I do at The Simpsons or some other sitcoms. Hell, I find Two and a Half Men a lot funnier than Futurama. (I don't know if that says more about Futurama or me, though, and I don't know that it's something I ought to be admitting, either...).

I do, however, love Futurama's opening credits. Like the title sequence for The Simpsons, this sequence is a tour of the world in which the show takes place, set to a catchy, somewhat goofy theme song. Also like The Simpsons, the opening credits for Futurama feature a gag that changes every episode, in this case the text under the main title itself. Here's a typical example:

But's here's an interesting bit of trivia for you: that theme song is apparently based on a much older piece of music. Naturally, somebody out there on the InterWebs has tracked down that piece of music and made it available to the entire world... click through for more!

Continue reading "The Original Futurama Theme" »

Posted by at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A couple years back, I devoted a pretty large chunk of copy to trying to explain what I thought was so cool about the late Johnny Carson.

Larry Aydlette sums it up in a single line:

There was something adult, sophisticated and boyishly wink-wink naughty all at the same time.

And he provides some video evidence of what he's talking about, too:

An appropriate thing to post at this time of night, no?

Posted by at 11:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

During the mid-90s, I was borderline obsessed with a television show called Highlander: The Series. Don't feel bad if you're not familiar with it. It was a low-budget syndicated spin-off from a relatively obscure movie, and it aired in the wee hours of the morning in many markets, so about the only regular viewers it ever had were insomniacs, night watchmen, and hardcore fanboys. (Actually there seem to be many more fangirls of this series, fairly unusual in sci-fi and fantasy fandom circles.)

One of these days, I'd like to do a detailed entry in which I attempt to explore why the 1986 Highlander film and the subsequent TV version appealed so strongly to me at that point in my life, but that's not really important right now. For the purposes of this entry, let me simply lay out a few important facts about the show:

• The protagonist, Duncan MacLeod, is a 400-year-old immortal man who can only be killed by decapitation. He can recover from any other "fatal" injury.
• Each episode of the series features a number of historical flashbacks which both flesh out Duncan's long backstory and have some bearing on the episode's present-day plotline.
• A significant portion of Duncan's backstory involves American Indians. (He lived among them for a time when he was trying to find peace and solace from his troubles.)
• Above all else, Duncan yearns to have a "normal" life, to have children and grow old with a woman he loves. This may be possible if he wins "The Prize." (It'd take too long to explain right now; just trust me on this one.)
• Duncan has a friend and confidante who knows about his secret immortality. This friend is an older man who owns a bar and plays blues guitar.
• Duncan is not a cop, but he often finds himself in law enforcement-type situations, solving mysteries, helping the helpless, defending the innocent, looking for killers, etc.

Okay, have you got all that? Now let's consider a few things about a new series I caught for the first time tonight called New Amsterdam:

Continue reading "Duncan MacLeod vs. John Amsterdam" »

Posted by at 9:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Chenopup already let the cat out of the bag in the comments to the previous entry, but in case you don't read those, here's a follow-up to the news about CBS.com streaming classic television episodes: NBC.com is doing the same thing with some its old shows, namely The A-Team, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, the original Battlestar Galactica, the disco-rific Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (mmmm, Erin Gray), Emergency!, Miami Vice, and Rod Serling's Night Gallery. (You trivia hounds may remember that Steven Spielberg's first job was directing Joan Crawford in an episode of Night Gallery...)

Continue reading "More Streaming Classics" »

Posted by at 5:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, enough of that nasty politics stuff. Let's get back to some hardcore geeking, shall we?

Courtesy of Michael May comes this interesting video clip, a mash-up of all the title sequences for the TV series Doctor Who. It's fairly long, and probably only of interest to fans, but I find it pretty fascinating to see how the music and title effects have evolved over 45 years while still remaining instantly recognizable. The biggest difference, really, is one of pacing; the newer sequences are visually and aurally much, much faster. And that is probably a fine commentary on our times, when you think about it...

Posted by at 3:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I have a dysfunctional relationship with the TV series Lost.

It's like that girl you were crazy about back in high school, the one who had the wicked smile and knew exactly what effect those skin-tight designer jeans had on the young male of the species. The one who grooved on the power trip of getting you all hot and bothered under the bleachers and then saying "no" at the last second, not because she was afraid of the realness of it all or anything like that, but just because there was some nasty little part of her that liked screwing with your head. You remember her, right? And how you eventually got very bored and frustrated with her silly games, so you dropped her and found yourself a nice girl?

Well, that's about where I am with Lost. I've gotten tired of the tease, you see, and I'm impatient for this series to start explaining what the hell is going on. The producers keep assuring the fans that they know what they're doing, that it really is all leading up to something and this isn't just a repeat of The X Files's endless "mythology," but I'm still not sure I believe them, in spite of improvements toward the end of last season and in last night's Season 4 opener.

Frustration aside, though, I just keep coming back to Lost (just as I kept going back to old what's-her-name and her painted-on denim). Why do I torture myself this way? Why does my resolve crumble and I come walking back with my chin down and my hopes high that maybe this time I'll get what I no longer merely want but really damn need?

Continue reading "Heart of a Lion, Body of a Walrus" »

Posted by at 5:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Wow... how is it possible that even with my vast collection of ephemera and miscellaneous junk, not to mention my insatiable appetite for trivia and an unceasing affection for the decade I most closely consider my Formative Years -- that would be the Awesome 80s, for those who haven't been paying attention -- how is it possible that I have only now discovered that our favorite imitation AI once recorded his very own smarmy Christmas tune? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you "Merry Christmas, Santa Claus (You're a Lovely Guy)" by Max Headroom:

An immortal classic for sure, right up there with "What Can You Get a Wookiee for Christmas (When He Already Owns a Comb)." For the record, I found this fascinating little piece of pop-cultural flotsam here. And I promise this will be the last time I mention M-M-Max Headroom for a while-while-while.

Posted by at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I guess you can't avoid the ravages of age even when you're just a computerized simulacrum of a smart-alecky TV journalist from 20 minutes into a future that's now only a few seconds away:

Incidentally, why isn't the Max Headroom TV series on DVD yet? I know it was short-lived and firmly in the "cult classic" category, but surely a show as eerily prescient and ground-breaking as Max deserves its own shiny silver discs?

(And in case you're wondering what I mean by "prescient," the show predicted a lot of our current [then-future] society, including [just off the top of my head] "reality" TV, interactive programming, do-it-yourself video journalism, mindless consumption via credit cards and a form of online shopping, and even some of the stuff that guys like Ray Kurzweil believe is coming as part of "The Singularity", most notably the idea of downloading a human personality into a computer. Wow... now I really want to see Max again! It'd probably make a lot more sense now that it did in '85...)

Posted by at 1:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Courtesy of John Rogers, a concise, easy-to-follow, and surprisingly entertaining explanation of why all your favorite shows are drifting into re-runs:

And in case you're wondering, yes, I support the WGA wholeheartedly in this matter. Writers don't typically get a lot of recognition or respect in the film and television industry, but they are, to my mind, the most important part of the process. If somebody doesn't write the story to begin with, the guy in the jodhpurs and riding boots has nothing to direct, and the "talent" have nothing to say. It's that simple. And in a business as flush as Hollywood, to say there isn't enough money to go around is disingenuous at best. The vast majority of WGA members really don't make much money for their efforts, and if they're trying to survive purely on screenwriting, their income is likely to be pretty sporadic. In my book, they deserve their modest cut of the residuals pie a lot more than the suits deserve another Gulfstream...

Posted by at 3:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Joss Whedon, the revered creator of the cult-fave TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly, has been venting online about the way some in the press describe the ongoing writer's strike out in Hollywood. His comments are worth reading in their entirety, but I like the way he describes the act and art of writing (something I am not entirely unfamiliar with myself...):

Writing is largely not considered work. Art in general is not considered work. Work is a thing you physically labor at, or at the very least, hate. Art is fun. (And Hollywood writers are overpaid, scarf-wearing dainties.) It’s an easy argument to make. And a hard one to dispute.

...Writing is enjoyable and ephemeral. And it’s hard work.

It’s always hard. Not just dealing with obtuse, intrusive studio execs, temperamental stars and family-prohibiting hours. Those are producer issues as much as anything else. Not just trying to get your first script sold, or seen, or finished, when nobody around believes you can/will/should… the ACT of writing is hard. When Buffy was flowing at its flowingest, David Greenwalt [Ed. note: Greenwalt was a writer and producer on Buffy] used to turn to me at some point during every torturous story-breaking session and say “Why is it still hard? When do we just get to be good at it?” I’ll only bore you with one theory: because every good story needs to be completely personal (so there are no guidelines) and completely universal (so it’s all been done). It’s just never simple.

It’s necessary, though. We’re talking about story-telling, the most basic human need. Food? That’s an animal need. Shelter? That’s a luxury item that leads to social grouping, which leads directly to fancy scarves. But human awareness is all about story-telling. The selective narrative of your memory. The story of why the Sky Bully throws lightning at you. From the first, stories, even unspoken, separated us from the other, cooler beasts. And now we’re talking about the stories that define our nation’s popular culture – a huge part of its identity. These are the people that think those up. Working writers.

"Human awareness is all about story-telling." Nice.

Posted by at 3:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, I've been thinking all day about that Starfighter video game, specifically about how truly weird it is that somebody bothered to make one and that people -- at least a few people -- are moved to talk about it here in the year 2007, some 23 years down the road from the movie's release.

Look at this way: the guys who made that game, the bloggers who've posted about it, and the people who read those blogs are all using technologies that would've sounded almost as science-fictiony back in 1984, the year The Last Starfighter was released, as the idea of aliens recruiting Earth kids to fight in interstellar wars, which is that movie's premise. The Internet is arguably one of the most revolutionary gadgets our species has ever come up with, and what do we mostly use it for? Besides distributing pictures of naked girls, I mean? To commemorate, reproduce, disseminate, and obsess over pop-cultural artifacts that are two or three decades old. In other words, we're using this very futuristic tech to talk about stuff from the past. Does that strike anyone else as weird?

I've been gradually formulating an idea over the past several months, largely in response to all the recent remakes of movies that I loved as a kid, that popular culture seems to have frozen -- some would probably say "stagnated" -- somewhere around the end of the 1980s. Oh, sure, a lot of original work is still being produced, but the stuff that really gets people talking all stems from a roughly 25-year period -- let's say 1966-1989 -- that ended a generation ago.

Continue reading "The End of Pop Culture?" »

Posted by at 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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...

Posted by at 2:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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...

Posted by at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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 "The Night Belongs..." »

Posted by at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by at 5:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From this guy via this guy:

A good way to make fun of someone who loves the new, super-serious remake of Battlestar Galactica: tell them the show inherently makes no logical sense to you without Muffit, the robot dog. Sci-fi fans are so pissy and serious these days they become infuriated at the mention of anything cute.

Next time I'm called upon to defend my love of the old Battlestar and my utter indifference to the new one (which seems to happen fairly often, sadly enough), I'm going to give this strategy a try. If nothing else, it should be fun to watch those smug Neo-G fans splutter incoherently for a little while...

(Incidentally, if you decide to backtrack to the source of that quote, be warned that SamuraiFrog can get a little... off-color... at times. Not that there's anything wrong with that...)

Posted by at 4:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I was surprised and amused recently to learn that Galactica 1980 -- the abortive first effort to revive the Battlestar Galactica franchise, years before anyone ever heard of that Ron Moore fellow -- is coming to DVD. I was less amused when I got a look at the cover art and saw that some marketing genius somewhere has tagged the show as "The Original Battlestar Galactica's Final Season."

Come on, guys... hasn't the reputation of the original Galactica suffered enough in recent years? G80 was a spin-off of the original show, not another season, and I don't know of any fans of Classic BG who consider it to be "official" in any way. Mostly, we try to forget it ever happened. Saying that it's part of the original series is like claiming that you haven't seen every episode of M*A*S*H until you've seen AfterM*A*S*H, too. Or, as my buddy Dave put it when I IM'd him with this news:

Talk about spin in order to sell more DVDs. Let's face it, if they called it, "A really crap show that has almost no connection to the original series, and is so low budget they couldn't afford Cylon costumes, but it's cool if you're a fan of Cousin Oliver," I don't think many people would buy it.

Yeah, that about says it all...

Posted by at 1:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is getting into some very tall grass on the Plains of Geekiness, but I can't help it... I love this cheez-ball stuff:

The Bad Astronomer reminds us that today, September 13, would have been the eighth anniversary of the Moon blasting out of Earth orbit if the premise of Space: 1999 had come true.

(If you don't remember it -- and not a lot of people do -- Space: 1999 was a TV series back in the early '70s. It begins with a nuclear explosion -- a superimposed title informs us that the date is September 13, 1999 -- that sends the Moon hurtling into deep space, carrying with it the 300 or so inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha, who then proceed to have various far-out adventures every week. Whoever was writing the show had a weaker grasp of basic science than my inbred, semi-feral pet cat, as common-sense things like the immense distance between star systems were routinely ignored -- not to mention the fact that Alpha apparently had an inexhaustible supply of its Eagle shuttlecraft, considering that one or two got wrecked every week -- but what the show lacked in sense, it made up for in style. The aforementioned Eagle, for instance, is still one of the coolest-looking spaceship designs ever put on film, in my humble opinion.)

It's strange, sometimes, being a science fiction fan in the 21st century; as all these iconic dates for made-up events that never occurred recede into the distance, it's hard not to feel an odd twinge of disappointment, of loss for what might have been. For instance, NASA did not launch the last of America's deep-space probes in 1987 with Captain William "Buck" Rogers at the controls... there were no Eugenics Wars in the mid-1990s that ended with a group of genetic "supermen" stealing an advanced DY-100 spacecraft and slipping away from Earth (that's a good thing, actually)... and the spaceship Discovery did not explore Jupiter and the secret of the black monoliths in 2001. The result is that our fictional worlds are now harder to believe in, if only for an hour or two's viewing time, and the real world just isn't as cool as we grew up thinking it would be. Consider, for example, the fact that we never see anything like this anywhere but our imaginations:

Sigh.

Image source.

Posted by at 4:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the charges that is frequently leveled at George Lucas by his detractors is that he cares only about expanding his already considerable (i.e., unbelievably immense) fortune. I've never believed that one, myself. Whatever his faults, however inscrutable his motivations, greed simply cannot be among them. If it were, he'd be a lot smarter about what he's trying to sell to his fans.

No, this isn't another rant about Uncle George's stubborn refusal to put out a decent DVD release of the pre-Special Edition Star Wars, although that is a good example of what I'm talking about, because you know he'd sell those by the truckload if he'd just relax a little.

I'm actually talking about the upcoming DVD release of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles... or, as the series has been retitled, The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones. (I told you he'd change the name, didn't I?)

Continue reading "Young Indy on DVD: What is George Thinking?" »

Posted by at 9:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Couple of random quickies spotted in between this afternoon's proofing jobs:

Via SF Signal, Premiere magazine's Top 20 Big-Time Plot Twist movies:

1. The Planet of the Apes (1968)
2. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

   [Ranty little editorial note: I modified this title, which Premiere has listed as Star Wars: Episode V -- The Empire Strikes Back. Perhaps I'm just showing my age, but I'll never get down with this episode numbering schtick. The first movie was Star Wars, and its sequels were Empire and Return of the Jedi. Call the prequels whatever you like, but I remember How Things Used to Be...]
   

3. Fight Club (1999)
   
4. Psycho (1960)
   
5. Citizen Kane (1941)
   
6. Soylent Green (1973)
   
7. The Usual Suspects (1995)
   
8. Oldboy (2003)
   
9. Mission: Impossible (1996)
   
10. Friday the 13th (1980)
    
11. Chinatown (1974)
    
12. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919)
    
13. The Wicker Man (1973)
    
14. 12 Monkeys (1995)
    
15. Jacob's Ladder (1990)
    
16. Eddie & the Cruisers (1983)
    
17. Angel Heart (1987)
    
18. The Game (1997)
    
19. The Sixth Sense (1999)
    
20. The Crying Game (1992)

It's a pretty good list, I think, although some of these -- Apes, Empire, Soylent Green, Kane -- have been so parodied, imitated, or otherwise talked about that they long ago lost their power to surprise anyone but the most sheltered media consumer. Still, I can attest from personal experience that Empire's big revelation was damn powerful when it was fresh, and I imagine Rosebud and the Statue of Liberty must've packed similar punches in the days before the Internet and home video made everyone into obsessive pop-cultural encyclopedias.

For the record, I've seen all but six of these movies. The ones I've missed (assuming anyone cares) are The Usual Suspects, Oldboy (which I've never heard of prior to seeing this list), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Wicker Man, Angel Heart, and The Game.

And moving right along, Michael Hinman at SyFy Portal says the "reimagined" Flash Gordon isn't long for this or any other world. Not a big surprise, based on the reactions I've been reading (which range from tepid to loathing). I'm still morbidly curious about it, though; maybe it'll get a DVD release so I can at least rent it...

Posted by at 1:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Speaking of remakes, I've run across a potentially interesting LiveJournal that, aside from one entry on the new Flash Gordon series, seems to be predicated around a defense of the original Battlestar Galactica and a denunciation of the "reimagined" version that's attracted so much love the last couple years. So far, Countess Baltar (as the LJ author is calling herself) hasn't made an argument in her own words, preferring instead to let carefully selected quotations from Ron Moore, Glen Larson, and various literary critics make her points for her. It's an interesting approach, although I would like to hear more from the Countess herself as to what, specifically, she dislikes about the remake.

Despite giving the new series a grudging thumbs-up after seeing a few episodes, I have to admit that I've never warmed to it, and indeed I've never watched more than just those first few installments. I can't deny that the series appeared to be well-made and intelligent, but it simply didn't appeal to me. It wasn't my Battlestar, and those weren't my Apollo, Starbuck, and Adama. The reimagined versions of those characters may have shared the same names as characters played by Richard Hatch, Dirk Benedict, and Lorne Greene -- well, sort of, since these exotic monikers have been turned into "call signs" in the new show, rather than actual names -- but there was very little else about them I found familiar.

Whatever Countess Baltar's specific gripes -- and I look forward to finding out more about those -- I certainly echo her concise statement of opinion in the "about me" sidebar:

Battlestar Galactica (1978)?:
Yes

Battlestar Galactica (2003)?:
No

Starbuck (male)?:
Yes

Starbuck (female)?:
No

Baltar, Count?:
Yes

Baltar, Gaius?:
Hell, no!

Posted by at 9:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As best I can recall, my introduction to the medium of comic books came when I was six years old. I was home from school, sick in bed with a bad cold or the flu or something. My dad went to the local drugstore to get some medicine, and when he returned, he also had with him a little treat that he hoped would cheer me up, or at least distract me in between puking sessions: a pair of what he called "funnybooks." Which confused me, because they weren't funny. But that's beside the point. One was a collection of stories about Superman and his various friends, cousins, and pets. The other (which I found much more appealing, probably due to the semi-lurid cover art) was an issue of a series called Marvel Team-Up.

As the title suggests, the premise of this series was to combine two or more characters who wouldn't have ordinarily crossed paths in their own titles, and then send them off on an adventure together. In the issue my dad got for me -- which somehow is the only one of this series I've ever read -- the action was played straight. Apparently, however, not every issue was so serious:

Spider-Man and the cast of Saturday Night Live? Wow, I've got to track that one down... that's got to be a hoot. Especially if you read it drunk, which is probably how it was written. Click the pic to go to the image source and a synopsis.

Incidentally, I understand that most issues of Marvel Team-Up were self-contained stories. Naturally, that lone issue my dad got me, the only one I've ever read -- which, to no one's surprise I'm sure, I still have -- was one of the rare two-parters. To this day, I have idea how Spidey manages to free the Scarlet Witch from Cotton Mather's foul mind-controlling cross-power...

Posted by at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Well, the Sci Fi Channel's new Flash Gordon series premiered over the weekend. I didn't see it myself -- I don't have cable, because I'm too cheap to pay a monthly fee for another hundred channels of The Same Old Crap™ just so I can catch the occasional novelty -- but from what I'm finding on the web this morning, I gather it wasn't good. One fellow is even calling for a "jihad against the Sci Fi Channel" before it can "reimagine" any other older properties. (Someone should've thought of that following the crappy Dune miniseries a few years ago -- arg! It still burns!)

I'm reserving final judgment on the show until I manage to see it for myself, but based on what I've been reading, I think it's pretty unlikely I'll approve of it any more than anyone I linked above. I can't say I'm surprised, given the Sci Fi Channel's spotty record and poor reputation among its target audience, but I am disappointed. While I tend to oppose remakes in general, I think Flash Gordon is a hero that can (and perhaps should) be revived and reinterpreted for each new generation, just as Batman and Superman have been revisited many times; as the premiere has inched closer, I've honestly been looking forward to a 21st Century take on what's been called "the original space adventure."

Continue reading "Pathetic Earthlings..." »

Posted by at 5:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Perhaps the cheesiest episode ever of the old 70s-vintage Buck Rogers TV show -- which is saying a lot, considering how that entire series was one long block of yummy, yummy fromage -- was "Space Rockers," wherein evil Jerry Orbach wants to control the minds of the galaxy's youth via subliminal signals embedded in truly awful music. Actually, it probably wasn't such a bad idea for a story, at least not back then, when people still believed there were backmasked Satanic messages underlying "Stairway to Heaven." The way it was executed, however... oy. I thought it was embarrassing even when I was a kid and Buck was don't-miss-viewing.

Part of what made it so dippy was the appearance of the "rock" band Orbach was secretly using for his nefarious scheme. Leaving aside their cringe-inducing costumes -- which consisted of body stockings and rope lights -- their "playing" looked really, well, goofy. The series was set in the 25th Century, so everything had to be electronic and futuristic-looking, right? That meant that the "guitar" had no strings and Bonzo played his "drum kit" by tapping plastic rods with a pencil. But the most ridiculous item was the synthesizer/keyboard doohickey: it was just a table with colored circles on it, which was the musician "played" by passing his hands (or, in an over-the-top eruption of Velveeta, his leg) over them. Have a look at the video, if you dare.

Silly, right? Well, maybe not. Via Scalzi comes word of a new electronic musical instrument called the ReacTable, and I'll be damned if it isn't highly reminiscent of that old Buck Rogers prop:

Wired.com has an article about this new instrument here.

You know, if something from Buck Rogers had to developed out here in the real world, I think I'd have chosen those spandex jumpsuits that Erin Gray always wore. Maybe there's still hope for those...

Posted by at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This is kind of fun for people who are fully comfortable with the depths of their geekiness: it's a video compilation of the entire 36-year run of the original Doctor Who series (including the 1999 TV movie that aired on Fox) condensed into a little over five minutes.

(Via)

Fascinating to see how the visual tone of the series (not to mention the production values!) changes over the years...

Continue reading "The Compleat Doctor Who" »

Posted by at 1:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Courtesy of Eric D. Snider, a former Utahn who now snarks at movies for a living in Portland, Oregon, comes a manifesto written by this guy, a radio DJ from the Pacific Northwest. With only a few minor tweaks, it could've just as easily been written by myself:

What a geek believes
According to Rick Emerson

I believe that Han shot first. I believe that Ally Sheedy was hotter before Molly Ringwald cleaned her up. I believe in miniatures, models, claymation, and not revealing the shark until you absolutely have to. I believe that George Lucas, for better or for worse, change[d] the way we see the world, each other, and ourselves. And I believe that we will someday reach those stars that he himself made visible. I believe that George Lucas is also a narrow-minded, money-grubbing, pig-headed slave to the now, who ought to be locked away from his own creations, lest he do them further harm. I believe that Jean-Luc Picard is the better Starship Captain, but I also believe that James Tiberius Kirk is infinitely cooler. I believe that a child standing in line to buy a book at midnight is fantastic; I believe that reading makes you smart — it’s schools that make you dumb. I believe that any episode of Futurama is better than any program featuring a precocious teenager who’s wise beyond their years. I also believe Buffy the Vampire Slayer to be the sole exception that proves this rule. I believe that comic books are an art form, and will someday be recognized as such. I believe that good shows die too young; and crap shows last too long. I believe that Eddie Izzard is the funniest man alive, and I don’t care whether you’ve ever heard of him or not — it’s still true. I believe that a girl who likes movies about zombies is hotter than whoever is on the cover of Maxim this month. I believe that Belloch ate that fly, I swear to God that I heard Luke call Leia “Carrie,” and I believe that Samwise Gamgee never quite got the credit he really deserved. I believe in magic, I believe in dreams, I believe in the power of music, movies, and the untold worlds inside an everyday library card. And I do not believe that geeks will inherit the earth; I believe that we already have.

So, did you catch all the references? If you're wondering about those tweaks I mentioned, they're after the fold:

Continue reading "What a Geek Believes" »

Posted by at 1:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Okay, last week I was obsessing over Flash Gordon, and now this week I keep going on about The Wonder Years. So I'm a fanboy, sue me. Well, no, on second thought, don't do that. I'll be nice...

If you're interested, Wired has just posted an interview with Danica McKellar about her new book and "why being a math whiz and a girly girl are not mutually exclusive." It's a pretty interesting read, and it even includes a link to McKellar's published proof, Percolation and Gibbs states multiplicity for ferromagnetic Ashkin–Teller models on Z2.

No, I don't know what that means. And neither do you, so stop trying to show off...

Posted by at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A few of the things that've grabbed my attention in the last couple days:

Continue reading "Drive-By Blogging 4: Return of the Blog" »

Posted by at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Arg! I have several longer entries that I'd like to finish and get posted up here, but naturally my days have been too hectic recently to allow that. So, in lieu of writing anything genuinely interesting, allow me to direct you to this preview of the Sci-Fi Channel's upcoming Flash Gordon series.

The trailer doesn't show you very much, but my first impression is that it looks promising. I'm getting a definite sense of cliffhanger-style derring-do, although that could just be an artifact of fast editing and the proper choice of music. (I must admit, I started grinning like an idiot when I noticed the "dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-Flash!-Ah-aaaahhh!" in the background. I hope they actually use some of the old Queen theme song in this new show, and that it's not just a tease to get us thirtysomething fanboys all hyped up.)

I have heard some rumors that I'm not happy about, namely that Flash and his sidekicks reach the planet Mongo via some kind of stargate, rather than aboard a rocketship as in every previous version of Alex Raymond's venerable tale. Also, the new series will apparently lack many of the familiar supporting characters from the earlier versions -- no Barin, Aura, Fria, Thun, or Vultan, and probably no hawkmen or floating city in the sky either. In short, many of the elements that distinguish Flash Gordon in the first place. I find myself wondering yet again, as I did when I first saw the new Battlestar Galactica, exactly how much you can get away with changing before a remake should more properly be allowed to develop into a whole new (if somewhat similar) property, with a different title and different characters.

On the positive side, however, a glance through Sci-Fi's gallery of publicity stills turns up a number of Flash Gordon-y images, including some good, old-fashioned female pulchritude and our hero in pulpy peril. Oh, and I've heard that the producers have approached Sam J. Jones, the 1980 Flash, about doing a cameo or longer guest appearance. That sort of thing makes me happy; it's like when the 1979 Buck Rogers series included a role for Buster Crabbe, the original Buck and Flash. While some may dismiss these inclusions as stunts calculated to draw fans of the older version, I think they demonstrate that the producers of the new version respect what came before them. It's a decent thing to do for the older actors, and for fanboys like me who still revere the originals, it's fun and heartwarming.

The new Flash is set to premiere on August 10.

Posted by at 4:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Am I the only thirtysomething fanboy type in the country who couldn't care less about the new Transformers movie opening tomorrow next week? Seriously, I can hardly hear my own typing over the sound of all that saliva pouring into keyboards all across the blogosphere. Wired.com has published no less than three articles and a photo gallery; Boing Boing has already posted a point-counterpoint review entry; and my good friend Steve is alternately doing the Snoopy dance over the concept of photo-realistic Autobots and fulminating against the fact that notorious crap-master Michael Bay directed the film.

Me, I just don't get the fuss. I watched the old cartoon show and found it entertaining enough, and I also think its way cool that Peter Cullen -- the voice actor who played heroic Optimus Prime on the old cartoon -- was asked to reprise the role for this new movie. But I never owned a Transformer toy, I never saw the 1986 animated Transformers movie, and the previews for this new version leave me absolutely cold. I guess I'm just a couple years too old for this particular pop-cultural touchstone to have affected me... and for some reason, that bothers me. I don't know why...

Posted by at 9:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As fate would have it, today, in addition to the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, is also Towel Day, the international tribute to the late Douglas Adams. The 25th of May is a very hoopy day indeed.

Posted by at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Just in case you read my pointless ramblings via an aggregator, or otherwise don't follow the comments, there's been an interesting development in regards to yesterday's entry on the new Flash Gordon series. I've been contacted by Andrea, the webmaster for EricJohnsonWeb.com, who informs me that the head shot of Eric I saw is seven years out of date. She directed me to this more recent photo, and, based on it, I've got to admit that I was wrong. A little older now, Mr. Johnson has definitely acquired what I would consider the proper "Flash Gordon look" since that Smallville shot was taken. So this latest incarnation of Alex Raymond's legendary adventure story has that much going for it at least.

Interestingly, I failed to notice yesterday that Eric has, in fact, done some work I have some passing familiarity with, namely the Work and the Glory films. If you haven't heard of these, don't feel bad. I doubt that many people outside of Utah have.

Continue reading "More on Eric Johnson" »

Posted by at 5:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I was just reading about the new shows CBS has coming up this fall, and I found something curious about this one:

MOONLIGHT, from prolific movie producer Joel Silver ("The Matrix" Trilogy), is about Mick St. John (Alex O'Loughlin, upcoming "White Out"), a captivating "undead" private investigator who uses his acute vampire senses to help the living - instead of feeding on them. In an agonizing twist of fate, Mick was "bitten" 60 years ago by his new bride, the seductive and beguiling Coraline (Amber Valletta, "Hitch"). Immortal and eternally as young, handsome and charismatic as he was then, Mick is sickened by Coraline and other vampires who view humans only as a source of nourishment. With only a handful of undead confidantes for company, including deceitful ally Josef (Rade Serbedzija, "24"), Mick fills his infinite days protecting the living, and trying not to think about how his life would have been if he hadn't followed his heart. However, after six decades of resisting, he wonders if it's time to pursue the love of a mortal. He has his eyes on Beth Turner, a beautiful, ambitious reporter who has been covering the ongoing plague of unusual murders. But would Beth even consider giving up a normal life to be with him, and can Mick risk the pain of seeing himself as a monster in her eyes? As Mick lives between two realities, fighting his adversaries among the undead and falling in love with Beth, he knows he needs to figure out a reason to keep "living."

You see, I remember that show being called Forever Knight when it aired about 15 years ago...

Posted by at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Remember a while back when I expressed cautious enthusiasm for the SciFi Channel's upcoming take on the venerable Flash Gordon character? Well, I'm no longer so optimistic about this project, not after seeing who the producers have cast as Flash and his lady love, Dale Arden.

Continue reading "How Old Should a Hero Be?" »

Posted by at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

One of the groovy things about having one of those new-fangled HDTVs is that I now get more channels than I used to, and I didn't even have to sign up for cable or The Dish. The secret is the digital transmissions that piggyback onto the plain ordinary old signal that merely mortal TVs pick up. Where I used to get only channel 5, for example, I now have 5.2 (a high-definition version of the same programming carried on analog 5) and 5.3 (a local weather channel and news headline ticker). It's pretty cool. And something that's really cool is channel 16.1, part of the ION television network. (My old TV didn't pick anything up at all on channel 16, so I don't know if this station has an analog equivalent or not. It's a completely new thing for me.)

And what, you may be asking, is so cool about this channel 16.1? Only a nice assortment of the classic programs that I grew up loving. How does The Wonder Years every night at 9 pm sound to you? Or Kung Fu, Charlie's Angels, and the original Mission: Impossible?

Or how about the fact that I was channel-surfing last night and ran across my beloved original version of Battlestar Galactica, airing at 6 pm on Sunday night just the way it did back in '78? It was even a good episode, "The Living Legend," with Lloyd Bridges as Commander Cain in command of the Galactica's long-lost sister ship, the battlestar Pegasus.

I have the series on DVD, of course, but there was a certain small thrill that came from just running across it somewhere on television, instead of deliberately choosing to put the disc on. The only thing that would've made it better would've been if I'd laying belly-down on the floor in front of a roaring fire, resting my chin in my hands and feeling the ends of my shoelaces dangling across the backs of my legs, the way I remember doing it when I was eight.

Of course, a roaring fire last night would've been a little uncomfortable; it is drifting into summer, after all. But you get the idea.

Posted by at 5:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Believe it or not, the primary focus of my fanboy energies throughout most of the 1990s was not the Star Wars saga. Really. I know it's hard to accept, but it really wasn't. It wasn't even Star Trek, despite all the various TV spin-offs running at that time. No, for the better part of the final decade of the 20th Century, I was seriously preoccupied by a fictional universe called Highlander.

Highlander is tough to explain to the uninitiated. It has a fairly bizarre premise to begin with, and its cause isn't helped by the fact that all the different properties that fall under the Highlander brand tend to contradict each other, or at the very least don't share the same continuity. I'm not going to go into all that in this entry -- I'll explore that topic some other time -- but what you need to know (if you don't already) is that the entire franchise originated with a 1986 movie and was revisited in a television series by the same name that ran from 1992 through 1998.

When Highlander: The Series ceased production in '98, The Girlfriend and I were sufficiently wrapped up in the whole scene that we flew to LA to attend a big farewell convention dedicated to the show. It was an exciting event -- the entire regular cast was in attendance, as well as a lot of the more prominent guest stars, and, of course, fans from all over the country.

Continue reading "Bill Panzer: That Guy in the Elevator" »

Posted by at 11:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I'm not a big fan of Conan O'Brien -- as I believe I've mentioned before, I much prefer his cross-channel rival Craig Ferguson -- but I did enjoy his little tour of George Lucas' special-effects shop last night:

Continue reading "Conan O'Brien Visits ILM and Uncle George" »

Posted by at 8:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A long time ago, just before I started my freshman year of high school, I fell in love with the British TV series Doctor Who. You know, that ultra-low-budget sci-fi serial about a guy who time-travels in an old telephone booth (well, technically, a police box, but it's still a variety of phone booth) and encounters all manner of bizarre creatures bent on destroying humanity and conquering the universe?

Continue reading "The New Who" »

Posted by at 6:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is something that's bothered me off and on for several years, but this morning I finally reached my breaking point: what the hell is the matter with the audio mix on The Today Show?

Anytime they use background music for a segment -- which is pretty much all the time these days on this increasingly fluffy and pointless "news" program -- the music is so loud that it drowns out the voiceover. It happened this morning while Matt Lauer was reminiscing about his best experiences while doing his "Where in the World is Matt Lauer?" segments, which I still enjoy despite my general disdain for Today. The insidiously catchy and terminally annoying Outkast tune "Hey Ya" was playing over the story, cranked up to the point where I could hardly hear Matt at all, so what I ended up with essentially a music video with visuals of Lauer on an aircraft carrier, walking around Red Square, etc.

I've wondered for some time if the problem was with the TV in my bedroom (I usually half-listen to the various morning shows while I dress for work, so I can catch a weather forecast), but today, because I was actually interested in the story in question, I tried the HDTV in my living room; same thing there. Are the show's producers even aware of this issue? Is it deliberate on their part? Do they think for some reason that viewers find it pleasant or exciting to have music drowning out the host personalities that we're supposedly tuning in to listen to? Or are we just supposed to look at them? Why have the hosts at all? Why not just play music? Oh, wait, that's what the radio is for, isn't it? Idiots...

Oh, and as long as I'm bitching, I'd love to see all the national morning shows drop their outside "plaza" segments, too; listening to the screaming crowds of people who all seem to think that their Aunt Mildred in Peoria will somehow pick out their single voice from the cacophony is even more annoying than the nine-millionth play of "Hey Ya." Not that the goofball weather-guessers who mingle with the crowd ever have anything all that important or amusing to say, I just don't like all the noise. Arg...

Posted by at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Tales of the Gold Monkey, which I mentioned in the previous entry, was another one-season-wonder of a television show that gouged a huge divot in my impressionable young brain. Curiously, it ran in the same 1982-83 television season as Voyagers! (back when network series still had discreet and contiguous seasons instead of only occasionally airing new episodes in between re-runs); there must've been something in the air that year that caused TV shows to lodge themselves so firmly in my memory. Hell, I still remember the actual time slots of the shows I loved: Voyagers! was on Sunday nights and Gold Monkey was Wednesdays. Yes, I did spend far too much time thinking about what was on the tube...

Be that as it may, Gold Monkey was a nifty show, a good old-fashioned pulp adventure set in the South Pacific of the 1930s. I think it failed largely because people compared it unfavorably to Raiders of the Lost Ark; both were set in the '30s and featured an all-American leather-jacketed hero and dastardly Nazis, so of course one had to be a rip-off of the other. But I didn't care about the similarities when I was a kid, and I've since decided that Gold Monkey was actually far more similar to the Bogart-Bacall classic To Have and Have Not than any of the Indiana Jones movies. Even in the '80s, however, nobody bothered to watch the classics, so the rip-off accusation stuck, and by the start of the '83-'84 season, Gold Monkey was only a memory. At least until somebody finally gets those DVDs into production!

While we wait for that boxed set of shiny silver discs, here's the opening title sequence, featuring an appropriately jaunty theme song by uber-composer Mike Post. I miss opening title sequences...

Posted by at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Wow, here's an announcement I never thought I'd read: the TV series Voyagers! will be released on DVD on July 17th.

What's that? You say you've never heard of Voyagers!? Well, I'm not surprised. It lasted only a single season, but it made a huge impression on me. Aimed squarely at the 10-14 year old market, the show was about a handsome-but-lunkheaded time traveler who accidentally picks up a 10-year-old companion, then finds himself unable to return the kid to his own time. Not that the kid wants to go... you see, he's a history buff and an orphan, so blazing through the past is far more appealing than growing up in a boring old foster home in 1982. And his knowledge of history comes in useful, because our grown-up Voyager lost his handy guidebook and doesn't know crap about any of the events they keep finding themselves in the middle of.

It was all pretty silly and self-consciously educational in the way of early-80s kidvid, but I'm pretty sure this is one I'll still enjoy. I've already earmarked my $49.98 for the set. Now, if only somebody would get to work on Tales of the Gold Monkey...

Here are the opening credits for Voyagers!, which should give you a taste of the show if you don't remember it, or generate a nice nostalgic glow if you do:

Posted by at 6:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There were zombies wandering the streets of Salt Lake this past Sunday... and no, I don't mean the usual handful of homeless guys or would-be shoppers who didn't get the memo about the downtown malls being demolished. No, I'm talking about genuine, flesh-eating, shambling-corpse, movie-style zombies. Seems there was a film crew here last week shooting a pilot for a new TV series called The Rising, about the undead taking over an unnamed American city.

This really is the perfect location for a zombie project -- anyone who lives around here can tell you that Salt Lake is eerily appropriate for the anonymous role of "unnamed American city," and filming downtown on a Sunday provides that deserted, end-of-the-world look without even having to redirect traffic.

Brandon Griggs of the Salt Lake Tribune lent a helping hand as an extra; he writes about the experience here. There's also this nifty little behind-the-scenes video:

A quick note of explanation for the out-of-towners: that distinctive "cuckoo" sound you can hear as the zombie crowd begins to move is a audio cue that's linked to all the "walk/don't walk" lights in the downtown area. I guess it's intended to help blind pedestrians. If you're crossing in the north-south direction, you get the cuckoo; east-west is a "cheep-cheep" noise. As far as I know, this system is unique to Salt Lake. I've never heard these sounds in any other city I've ever visited.

Also, if you're curious, that zombie crowd is only about two blocks from my office building...

Posted by at 4:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Kristy Kruger is an award-winning singer-songwriter from Texas whose older brother, Lt. Col. Eric Kruger, was killed in Iraq a few months ago, on only his second day in the country. Kristy has since written a sad, sweet, deeply moving little song of farewell to her brother, and she's now on a 50-state tour of the U.S. to pay tribute to Eric's memory (she says she'd like to see what he died for, i.e., the whole of America). The tour has brought her here to Salt Lake, where she'll be performing tonight at a venue called Kilby Court.

Continue reading "The Stupidity of Local TV News" »

Posted by at 6:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Well, this is entirely unsurprising and also extremely disappointing: reports are surfacing that that the upcoming DVD release of WKRP in Cincinnati -- one of my all-time favorite television comedies -- has been heavily edited because of music clearance issues. Jaime J. Weinman has the details, but the short version is that pretty much all of the original music from the show is gone. And so are many scenes in which characters explicitly reference the original music, or which only make sense in the context of viewers hearing the music (like the infamous scene in which Mr. Carlson asks burn-out DJ Johnny Fever if he hears dogs barking while a Pink Floyd album plays).

Continue reading "WKRP: Looks Like I Won't Be Buying This One" »

Posted by at 5:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just to show you how reliable these Internet quizzes are, I just took another Firefly/Serenity-related one, and it tagged me as an entirely different character than the previous one:

Continue reading "Just for Comparison..." »

Posted by at 4:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is kind of cool:

Continue reading "Which Serenity Character Am I?" »

Posted by at 4:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Boy, does this ever sound like a recipe for total fanboy embarassment: take an ex-boy-bander who's gone a bit beefy with maturity, put him on a dippy reality-show dance-off with a bunch of other has-beens and B-listers, and let him do a routine set to that old disco-ized version of the main title from Star Wars, complete with a lightsaber prop. When I heard about this, I was prepared to hang my head in shame for ever liking a movie that could lead to this... and yet it turned out to be surprisingly entertaining, if not exactly cool:

No doubt it was the girl's Leia-style metal bikini that salvaged the whole thing...

Posted by at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

That episode of Boston Legal I mentioned a while back aired tonight, the one that was going to incorporate footage from a legal drama William Shatner did 50 years ago. It wasn't quite what I was expecting -- the episode used only three short vintage clips, and their usage was rather understated, with none of the "significant television event" atmosphere that usually permeates this sort of stunt. But it was nevertheless a very good episode. Writer-producer David E. Kelley dialed his trademark silliness way down for a tense hostage-crisis story that's really about the way fathers continue to influence grown men long after dad has passed on. Shatner, who is of course known as a relentless chewer of scenery and whose character on this show, Denny Crane, is something of a nutcase, delivered a subtle performance that I think ranks among the very best work he's ever done. And the final scene, in which Denny discusses the day's traumatic events with his friend Alan (James Spader), brought a lump to my throat; every BL episode ends on a similar note, with these two very successful, very damaged men sharing good cigars, good whiskey, friendship, and truths that have never before been spoken. But this one, in which Denny quietly says that he dosen't want to go home tonight and Alan immediately offer to come keep him company, was immensely moving.

I haven't been a regular viewer of this show, but I think I like it more with every episode I see...

Posted by at 11:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Shoot... I wish this wasn't scheduled in the middle of the day, when I'll be tied to my desk here in the Proofreader's Cave: the filmmaker Ken Burns will be speaking at BYU tomorrow at 11 a.m. His masterpiece documentary series The Civil War was one of the most profoundly moving television programs I've ever seen, and I'm looking forward to his new series about World War II with great anticipation.

It'll be interesting to see exactly how he stages this new documentary. His signature style -- slow pans across or zooms into a vintage photograph while actors read from writings contemporary to the photo's subject -- has been much copied, almost to the point of cliche, but Burns can still wring deep emotions from the technique. He's that good at what he does. However, in the case of WW II, there is a tremendous amount of motion-picture footage available -- a resource he obviously didn't have when he was discussing the Civil War -- so will he continue on with the stills because they're "his thing," or make more use of moving images? I suppose it will depend on the effect he's trying to achieve... but if he does go the motion-picture route, what will then differentiate his World War II series from all the other docs about that war, which is probably the most "documentarized" subject in world history?

I guess we'll find out... The War is scheduled to air on PBS stations in September. In the meantime, if anyone reading this happens to attend Burns' presentation tomorrow, drop me a line. I'd love to hear your impressions of him.

Posted by at 5:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It rained a few nights ago, and in the morning, after the storm had blown away, the sky looked as if it had been scoured and burnished. As I walked across the platform toward the light-rail train that was waiting to take me to work, I stopped and looked to the west. The slumped and rounded contours of the Oquirrh Mountains stood out clearly in the sparkling air, as if they were only yards away instead of miles, and all the houses and trees that blanket the valley floor were crisply defined as well. In the northwest corner of the valley, out over the Great Salt Lake, I could see a mass of leftover clouds piled up in a tall, gray heap that was shockingly dark compared to everything around it, and beautiful for the contrast it provided. The world looked clean and refreshed, and it suddenly struck me, as it occasionally does, that I really, really love living in this place where the mountains are so near and the sky so far above.

Unfortunately, the downsides of living in Utah often make an equally strong impression.

Continue reading "Yin and Yang" »

Posted by at 1:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today is The Shat's 76th birthday. So let's take a moment to consider all the wonderful things that this great, great man has contributed to our culture: James T. Kirk... T.J. Hooker... Denny Crane... Kingdom of the Spiders... the only movie ever made that's entirely in Esperanto...

To honor his continued existence here among us, allow me to present this video clip of The Shat clarifying, once for all, who and what he really is:

Remember, people: they were just puppets!

Posted by at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is a fun idea: an upcoming episode of William Shatner's television series Boston Legal will incorporate footage from The Defender, a courtroom drama that Shatner filmed 50 years ago, back in the days of live TV (it's available on DVD, oddly enough), as a flashback to explain why a hostage taker has a grudge against Shatner's BL character, Denny Crane. No word on if the old clips will be colorized or digitally massaged in any way, but with Boston Legal, you never can tell -- they may run them in grainy black-and-white for effect.

I didn't think much of Boston Legal the first couple times I watched it -- I have the same problem with it that I have with most of David E. Kelley's shows, which is that no people in the real world behave remotely the way his eccentric characters do -- but it's growing on me, in large part because of Shatner. Readers of this blog know that I like him anyway because of the Star Trek connection, but in the role of Denny Crane, he's finally shed any lingering typecasting from having been Captain Kirk and seems, for the first time (and the first performance) in years, to be really comfortable and happy in a role again. And his chemistry with James Spader is simply delicious.

Posted by at 6:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

An article on IGN.com is reporting that The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles are finally on their way to DVD, according to the Great Flanneled One. However, it looks like I'll still have to hold on to the old VHS recordings I made of the series when it originally aired:

The DVDs will include the reedited versions of the series previously available on VHS, which took the 44 episodes of the show and turned them into 22, 90 minute, feature length stories.

(Emphasis mine.)

Continue reading "Young Indy on DVD" »

Posted by at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When the series 24 premiered way back in 2001 (has it really been that long ago? Wow...), I thought it was brilliant, inventive, exciting, and, above all, grown-up television. Yeah, the plot was full of holes when you viewed it from the mile-high, all-season-long perspective, and the show suffered a bit from the "one-damn-thing-after-another" quality of the cliffhanger serials from which it descended. But when taken episode by episode, 24 was (and still is, despite its flaws) compellingly watchable, suspenseful storytelling that makes a strong argument for serialized TV drama being the modern-day equivalent of Dickens' episodic novels.

I've loyally stuck with 24 for the past five seasons, but I must admit that I've done so with an increasing sense of discomfort. My growing ambivalence for the show is partly a result of the inevitable decline that comes as any TV series ages out -- in other words, the concept is just getting tired -- but a much bigger issue for me is the question of torture.

Continue reading "Jack Bauer to Speak to West Pointers About Torture" »

Posted by at 2:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So, Anna Nicole.

I must confess, I wasn't a fan. I thought she was a bimbo, actually, a grotesque and idiotic caricature of feminity, and an example of everything that's wrong with the American worship of fame for fame's sake.

Nevertheless, I find that I actually feel bad about her sudden death. She always seemed like such a helpless creature, and she has had a heavy ration of crap handed to her recently: the death of her 20-year-old son, the paternity battle over her infant son daughter, the on-going inheritance battle, and a newly minted class-action suit that named her, specifically, as a co-defendant. I have a hunch we're going to find out she died of an overdose, either accidental or deliberate. I find it very easy to imagine her washing down pills with a glass of vodka while blubbering that we wouldn't have Anna Nicole to kick around anymore. That's a terribly sad ending for any human being, even one whose only apparent goal in life was to "be famous."

I guess she managed that, though, didn't she? She'll now be enshrined alongside all those other starlets who met untimely and pathetic ends. Maybe that's what she's really wanted all the way along...

Posted by at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

If you've been hanging around this place for any length of time, you've probably got a pretty good handle on my tastes in entertainment. I like pulp adventures, science fiction movies, superhero comics, horror novels, and British comedy. In the simplest possible terms, I'm a geek. But aside from the social stigma of daring to like such things, what is the connection between them? Why is the core appeal of all these various genres?

A blogger named John Seavey has a pretty good idea:

Continue reading "Stranger Than Life" »

Posted by at 5:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

According to a brief article referenced over at SF Signal, the SciFi Channel is planning a new Flash Gordon series. A full 22-episode run (that's a complete season for a weekly series these days) has already been greenlighted.

Although I'm normally opposed to remakes on principle, I find that I'm okay with this one. That's probably because I grew up enjoying multiple (and radically different) versions of the Flash Gordon story, including the campy 1980 feature film that most readers of this blog probably know, the 1930s-vintage serials starring Buster Crabbe, and the comic books published by Gold Key in the late '70s. Like Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes, Flash seems to endure in part because he gets dusted off and updated for a new audience every 20 or 30 years. So long as the basic premise of his adventures on the planet Mongo and struggles against the evil Ming the Merciless remain intact, I'm willing to give the latest version a try.

My biggest concern is that SciFi's original productions generally look pretty cheap, and the involvement of Robert Halmi Sr. and his son suggests that this one will, too. Which is a shame. Personally, I'd love to see a Flash Gordon series that's visually faithful to the original comic strips drawn by Alex Raymond, possibly even beginning as a 1930s period piece before the action shifts to Mongo, but I imagine that such a series would cost more than SciFi wants to spend. We'll see, I guess. As I said, I'm willing to try it.

Incidentally, if you've never seen those original Raymond strips, the Checker Book Publishing Group has recently reprinted them in a series of nicely done hardcovers. I suggest you buy them from this guy, who has always provided me with fast delivery and excellent customer service.

And if you don't get the title of this entry, you obviously don't remember the best line of the 1980 Flash movie...

Posted by at 3:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Man, I must be getting old, because I was genuinely shocked -- shocked, I say! -- during tonight's episode of ER to hear one of our hunky, idealistic young doctors called somebody an asshole. I remember when Hawkeye Pierce on M*A*S*H called someone a bastard -- which is, to my mind, a far less vulgar and offensive term -- and it made headlines. I find myself wondering which expletives still remain on the verboten list for broadcast TV, and how long will it be before that list ceases to exist altogether? And is this a good thing?

I used to think it was cool that TV standards were loosening and that characters were starting to speak more like real people. But now I think this new-found realism comes with a price. You see, these words used to have real power when I was younger, and part of their power was that you only heard them in the movies. You only heard grown-ups use them, and often only under very specific circumstances. Today... well, today profanity just doesn't accomplish much. For example, a certain four-letter word that starts with "f" has become as common in casual conversation as "you know" and "um," and it's just as meaningless. And that bothers me. Not because I'm a prude, but because the word has been drained of its effectiveness. It used to be the ne plus ultra of cussing, the atom bomb of expletives, the one you reserved for extra-special occasions when nothing else was strong enough to make your point. What are we supposed to say now when we've just dropped a sledge hammer on our foot?

I'm telling you, the world has gone to hell. And those kids today... I swear.

Posted by at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Just a little PSA for a couple of my loyal readers who I know are fans of the new Battlestar Galactica series: TVSquad.com is reporting that Tricia Helfer -- a.k.a. "Number Six" -- will appear in next month's issue of Playboy, presumably nekkid. Reserve your copy today.

Continue reading "Tricia Helfer Poses" »

Posted by at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I just ran across this while I was surfing:

So typical. You do good work, attain some measure of fleeting fame, then slide into semi-obscurity when the money runs out. Twenty-five years later, you think you're about to get your big chance at a comeback only to have your legs cut out from under you by a younger, flashier model. No doubt this photo was taken somewhere on Sunset Blvd., just to make the humiliation complete.

You know, something just occurred to me: I remember many people saying 25 years ago that the Cylon Centurions of Battlestar Galactica were obviously a rip-off of the armored Imperial stormtroopers from Star Wars. I never really saw the similarity back in the day... but it seems to me that the modern "reimagined" Centurions bear more than a passing resemblance to the Super Battle Droids seen in Episodes II and III. Hmmm...

Posted by at 1:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

You know, when I was a kid and my friends and I would debate over which side would win in a cross-universe match-up of apocalyptic proportions -- the most common of which was, of course, the Starship Enterprise against an Imperial Star Destroyer -- we had to imagine what it would look like. Maybe we were lucky enough to know a kid with some drawing skills who would doodle something in the margins of his Mead spiral-bound that he felt worthy of sharing with us, but mostly it all happened in our heads.

Not these days. Now the wonders of CGI and YouTube enable us to actually see all the action. Curiously, I don't find it nearly as satisfying as seeing it all in my mind's eye, but then I'm old fashioned that way. Your mileage may vary, of course. And on that note, here's the latest example of the genre, in which a fleet of Colonial battlestars goes up against a fleet of Imperial Star Destroyers:

Continue reading "Geek Wars: The Twelve Colonies vs. The Empire Edition" »

Posted by at 1:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There aren't many television spin-offs that even manage to stay on the air, let alone surpass their source material in quality. Frasier is the exception that proves the rule. I enjoyed Cheers, but I loved Frasier. You may recall that I gushed at length about this series when the show wrapped production; briefly, however, I thought it was a near-perfect mixture of sophisticated wit, lowbrow farce, and genuine human emotion (as opposed to the ersatz variety displayed by the sarcasm-bots on most sitcoms), specifically the complex emotions that exist between grown men and their fathers. In the end, it was a very different series from its parent show, and that was a big part of what made it great.

Continue reading "The Origins of Frasier, and WKRP is Coming!" »

Posted by at 6:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I know what you're thinking: "My god, another entry? What is this, five or six today? Doesn't this guy have anything better to do?" Well, actually, I probably do, but I don't feel like doing it. It's a pretty dull afternoon here in the Comma Mines. Much more fun to post silly blog entries about silly things... like, say, one of my favorite Saturday morning cartoons when I was a kid, a bizarre and violent mash-up of Star Wars, post-apocalyptic scenarios, and Alex Raymond-style background art called Thundaar the Barbarian. Author Chris Roberson (who credits this show as the [subconscious] inspiration for his excellent novel Paragaea: A Planetary Romance) reminded me of Thundaar this afternoon by posting a video clip of the opening credits. Here it is:

Continue reading "Thundaar" »

Posted by at 5:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

So, if that trailer the other day wasn't enough to convince you that there's something deeply disturbing about Mary Poppins, perhaps this will do the trick: it's a lengthy essay that details all the ways in which the 1964 "children's" film fulfills all three dynamics that typically characterize horror films. (The average horror film is usually predicated on only one of these dynamics, so Mary must be extra horrific!) Consider:

Continue reading "Mary Really is Scary, and The Fonz is a God!" »

Posted by at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Although most of my all-time favorite movies are natural choices for someone of my generation -- i.e., they were made during my childhood and adolescence in the '70s and '80 -- I also have a great deal of affection for movies that pre-date me, often by decades. I guess I'm kind of unusual in that regard; I've met a lot of people who have no tolerance for old movies, "old" being a highly subjective definition, of course. (I know of one guy who flatly refuses to watch anything that was made more than five years ago, even if it's something he saw and enjoyed a mere ten years ago. Yeah, I don't get it either.) Personally, though, I've never seen much difference between "old" and "new" movies, aside from the obvious stylistic and technological details. Movies are movies, in my book, and they're either effective and enjoyable or they're not.

Continue reading "The Return of an Old Favorite" »

Posted by at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Carrie Fisher was on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson last night. For my money, Ferguson is the best late-night talk-show host we've got -- Letterman and Leno are both way past their sell-bys, and I have never really warmed to Kimmel or Conan. Craig, though, is a hoot with his self-deprecating streak and naughty attitude, and Carrie is much the same; put the two of them together, and it's guaranteed entertainment. Most of last night's segment consisted of Craig giving her a bad time for having played Princess Leia in Star Wars and how, 30 years later, that's still what she's best known for. Carrie gave as good as she got, though; her funniest line, and the one I want to share with you now, was this:

George [Lucas] owns my likeness, you know. That means everytime I look in the mirror I have to send him a couple of bucks.

Ah, good times, although I imagine Carrie's delivery is better than mine. If I can find a video clip, I'll post it up...

Posted by at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hmm... this is an interesting experiment: someone has created a mash-up that places video from both versions of the classic Twilight Zone episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" side-by-side and sets it all to music by the band Pop Will Eat Itself. "Nightmare" is arguably the most famous Zone story; it's the one where a nervous flyer, played by a pre-Star Trek William Shatner in the original television segment and by John Lithgow in the 1983 TZ feature film, sees a gremlin tearing apart the plane and tries desperately to get someone to believe him. It's been parodied or referenced dozens of times, most notably in one of the The Simpsons' Halloween specials. I'm not sure what the intention of this video may have been, but it gives us movie-buffs a handy way to compare and contrast the two versions. You can probably guess which I prefer:

Continue reading "Which Nightmare Do Your Prefer?" »

Posted by at 1:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

According to Javi, there's a meme circulating among television producers who have blogs (there are three of them that I'm aware of) which asks them to name their Top 25 Favorite TV Characters Ever. I'm not a TV producer -- I don't even play one on, er, I guess that one's too obvious, isn't it? -- but I'm never one to let a good meme escape me. So read on to discover my picks...

Continue reading "My 25 Favorite TV Characters Ever" »

Posted by at 2:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I'm way behind the curve in linking to that website that parodies corporate motivational posters with Star Trek-inspired messages -- I think Boing Boing covered this item two weeks ago -- but I wouldn't be a good Trekkie if I didn't share my favorite with y'all anyway, so here you go:

Continue reading "The Inspiring World of Classic Star Trek" »

Posted by at 3:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A new meme, courtesy of Roberson's Interminable Ramble (Roberson being the author of Paragaea, that wonderful fantasy adventure novel I mentioned recently ). The gimmick is to bold the titles of television series of which you've seen at least three episodes, and bold and italicize those for which I've seen every episode. This should be enlightening... or frightening...

Continue reading "TV Meme" »

Posted by at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Oh, boy... this is bad. That dang Scalzi has just pointed me to a time-sink of unbelievable proportions: it's an online repository of old '80s-vintage music videos. Hundreds of them, enough to waste hours and hours looking at hair styles that, for some inexplicable reason, us thirtysomethings used to think were pretty cool.

Continue reading "Another Way of Wasting My Life" »

Posted by at 4:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I was about ten years old when I first saw the PBS series Cosmos, hosted by the late astronomer Carl Sagan. I was a pretty bright kid, if I do say so myself, and I think I probably knew more about science and history at that age than a lot of grown-ups do now. Still, I was only a kid, which meant that a lot of the series' content went over my head until I saw it again years later. Even so, I remember being utterly captivated by the big ideas behind Cosmos: that history, both of our puny little species and of the entire universe, is like an epic journey; that life, even intelligent life, may be ubiquitous in the universe but is nevertheless incredibly fragile and therefore precious; that knowledge and the quest to understand is at the core of our species; and that human beings are simultaneously -- and paradoxically -- insignificant in our scale to creation, but infinite in our spirits, destined for great things if we can only avoid destroying ourselves. I was equally fascinated by the show's host, Dr. Sagan, who seemed to my ten-year-old self like such a gentle, kind-hearted man, but also, in some way I couldn't quite put my finger on, a very sad man. I imagined that his sometimes grim demeanor must've come from his knowing everything there was to know, and that he suffered because of that awful, burdensome knowledge. (Yes, I really was a brooding Romantic even at the age of ten.)

Carl Sagan had a son, Nick Sagan, who grew up to become a science-fiction novelist. On his blog the other day, I found the following video clip from Cosmos, in which his father sums up so much of what that series was about. Curiously -- or perhaps frighteningly -- his words from almost 30 years ago still seem relevant today:

Continue reading "Carl Sagan's Bad Dreams" »

Posted by at 6:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Media critic Jaime J. Weinman on what was so good about one of my all-time favorite TV shows, WKRP in Cincinnati:

"WKRP" has never really had a reputation on a par with "Taxi" or "Mary Tyler Moore" or "Barney Miller" or "M*A*S*H," but I think it was actually the best sitcom of its era when it came to the most important thing a sitcom can do: create memorable, distinctive characters and create comedy from those characters, instead of a lot of extraneous jokes. The characters on "WKRP" were all so well-defined that seeing them act out of character, even slightly out of character, could be inherently funny, and the characters all had different and well-defined relationships to each other, so you could put any two characters together in a scene and get a different type of comedy out of it.

The other thing Wilson did with the show was give it more variety than most sitcoms: it's not just that they'd do an occasional "very special episode," like the one about the Who concert in Cincinnati where kids were trampled to death; they would actually change the style and tone from week to week depending on what the story was about. So one week it would be a farce, another week a dramedy, still another week a traditional sitcom story and still another week an extended comedy sketch (there is one episode, "Hotel Oceanview," that is literally an adaptation of a Toronto Second City sketch by the same writer). "Mary Tyler Moore" and other MTM and MTM-style shows valued consistency in style and tone; "WKRP" fluctuated and experimented more, which may explain why it was treated as the red-headed stepchild at MTM ("I wouldn't watch it" -- Mary Tyler Moore).

The rest of his post contains a whole mess of 'KRP clips for your viewing pleasure. Go on over and have a look...

Posted by at 1:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Uncle George may have finally knuckled under and given the fanboys the ORIGINAL original trilogy on DVD, but there remain certain media properties I'd love to own but which are unlikely to ever appear on those shiny silver discs we love so much here at Simple Tricks. Like, for instance, WKRP in Cincinnati, one of my all-time favorite television shows as well as one of the best situation comedies of the late-70s/early-80s (and, arguably, of all time). Judging from what I read in various forums and message boards, there is strong consumer interest in WKRP on DVD, but part of what made the show so special is exactly what will probably keep it out of release forever: the music.

Continue reading ""I Thought Turkeys Could Fly"" »

Posted by at 5:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It has been the subject of countless geeky dorm-room debates: which would win in an all-out slug-fest for supremacy, an Imperial Star Destroyer or the Starship Enterprise?

The partisans for each of the two pre-eminent science-fiction franchises have been relentless in battles almost as fierce as the most famous space-combat scene never filmed; their fights have spanned Internet message boards and video arcades and parents' basements. At stake: nothing less than the honor and glory of their preferred fictional universes.

But now, some brave soul with some video-editing software and a lot of free time has decided to settle the fight once and for all. Well, sort of, since this version ends in an inconclusive draw:

Continue reading "Let the Hostilities Commence" »

Posted by at 5:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As if it weren't improbable enough that Bruce Campbell's short-lived TV series The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. is coming to DVD, now I hear that Bruce's other short-lived TV series, Jack of All Trades, is coming, too. Not to mention one of my favorite Saturday-morning cartoons when I was a kid. Simply amazing.

Continue reading "Everything Will Be on DVD Soon" »

Posted by at 5:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Taking a break from the numbingly bad jargon I've been proofreading all day, I see that media critic Jaime J. Weinman has written an insightful appreciation of the TV sitcoms of the 1960s, spelling out the reasons why he's been won over by them.

Among other things, he notes that:

Continue reading "Weinman on '60s-vintage Sitcoms" »

Posted by at 4:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I know you're all waiting on tenterhooks for the second half of my All-Time Favorite Movies list, but this was too good not to share immediately. For years, I heard whispered tales about Fred and Barney hawking Winston cigarettes back in the days when The Flintstones was running in primetime, but I'd never seen any actual evidence of it. When the news went out that the show would be released on DVD, there was much fanboy speculation about whether the legendary commercial would be included as an extra, and much disappointment when it was not. Some people even suggested that the whole thing was apocryphal, that it never happened.

But it did. And here's your proof:

I love weird little pop-culture artifacts like this...

[Ed. note: I found this clip courtesy of Mark Evanier; if you're interested, he offers a brief history of this commercial, The Flintstones, and some other primetime cartoons here.]

Posted by at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Another Internet quiz. Because I just love taking silly automated quizzes that ask a handful of random questions and then authoritatively declare that I'm just like a fictional character. Interestingly, my results this time indicate that I scored only a few points difference between one of the best-drawn characters of the Star Trek universe and a class of characters that are so ill-defined as to barely deserve the designation. What the heck does that say about me?

Your results:

You are Jean-Luc Picard

A lover of Shakespeare and other fine literature. You have a decisive mind and a firm hand in dealing with others.

Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Test

Posted by at 5:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

You may recall that a couple of months back, I reported on the rumor that Warner Bros. was going to release the short-lived Bruce Campbell series The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., on DVD. Well, Warner still hasn't made any kind of official announcement confirming the release, but the Web site TVShowsOnDVD.com is currently running a poll to determine which cover fans would most like to see on their Brisco discs. According to the site, this poll is sanctioned by Warner and the results will be taken into account by the studio. In addition, the two possible cover designs are said to be the real deal, actual mock-ups that have been approved by Warner, Bruce Campbell, and Brisco's producer, Carlton Cuse.

If you care about this show at all, run on over to TVShowsOnDVD and cast your vote now. It's a rare opportunity for consumers and fans to actually have a say in an upcoming product package, rather than just taking whatever stupid crap the marketing department comes up with. I think that's pretty cool. Oh, and in case you're wondering, my preferred cover is the less goofy one...

Posted by at 2:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Why is it that this season of 24, which is the most cartoonish, over the top, and amoral of the show's entire run -- I think it must be in Kiefer Sutherland's contract that his character, the indestructible Jack Bauer, has to torture somebody at least once an episode -- is also the most compelling and exciting the show has been in several years? Possibly since the first or second season? Seriously, last night's double-episode "event" had me feeling something I've not experienced for a very long time while watching a TV show or movie, a tightness in my belly that was also kind of hollow and fluttery. Now what the heck do you suppose that could that have been? Oh, yeah, I remember what you call that feeling: suspense. Genuine, edge-of-your-seat suspense. And that's not all. I felt other emotions, too, strong ones, including actual sorrow at the end of the night's second episode. Enough to produce tears even. I'm amazed and a little bit baffled, considering I was ready to give up on this show only a couple weeks ago. Still, as effective as last night's segments may have been, the show is definitely starting to creak...

[Warning: Spoilers follow. Don't read on if you taped it and don't what to know what happens.]

Continue reading "Catching Up with the Gang at CTU" »

Posted by at 5:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's Internet quiz time again! This time we're determining which science-fiction crew or ship I'd be best suited for. And here are my results:

Continue reading "My Sci-Fi Crew" »

Posted by at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Everyone once in a while, something makes me realize how very grateful I am to have grown up in the 1970s. People who were adults during that period may remember it as a hellish time of political scandal, long gas lines, runaway inflation, and impractically wide lapels -- I believe Jimmy Carter described all of the above as "malaise," which sums up the historical circumstances of that decade about as well as any other single word -- but it was a great time to be a kid. It was before everyone got so paranoid, before anyone coined the term "play date," before you had to armor up just to go ride your bike. We had real sugar in our Coke, Slurpees came in flavors that weren't made by Coke, and candy cigarettes were actually called candy cigarettes and not candy sticks or whatever they're called these days (can you even still get those things?). And to top it off, we had the live-action kid-vid television shows of Sid and Marty Krofft.

Continue reading "Jack Wild" »

Posted by at 6:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's been a rough couple of days for fans of classic (i.e., '60s and '70s vintage) TV. Over the weekend, we learned of the deaths of Don Knotts and Darren McGavin, and just yesterday afternoon I heard that Dennis Weaver has died as well.

Continue reading "Knotts, McGavin, and Weaver" »

Posted by at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Hey again, kids. Sorry it's been so long since I've posted. Hope you haven't missed my sterling prose too much. I've been working on a nice long recap of Anne's and my Yellowstone snowmobiling adventure, and I was planning to post it tonight, but...

There's always a "but" when computers are involved, isn't there? In this case, the "but" refers to the way I somehow lost three-quarters of the entry when I tried to e-mail the part I wrote at work this afternoon to myself so I could finish it tonight here at home. I'm hoping I can recover it tomorrow when I get into the office. If I can't, I'm going to be a very unhappy blogger, because I thought what I'd done was quite good. For a change. I haven't been terribly proud of my recent writing here at Simple Tricks; this entry, however, seemed to be going very well.

In any event, I'm long overdue to give you guys something -- I'm surprised my three loyal readers aren't banging their tin cups against the bars by this time -- but about all I have to give you tonight is another of those e-mail survey thingies that occasionally makes a circle of the 'net. You know, those long lists of random questions that try to elicit trivial responses. It's kind of lame, I know, but it's quick content, and you may learn something interesting about moi. Hopefully, I'll find my travel piece waiting for me tomorrow and I'll be able to finish it and get it up to you before tomorrow night. In the meantime, enjoy the trivia...

Continue reading "Consolation Prize" »

Posted by at 11:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Just a few thoughts I had while watching tonight's exciting episode of 24:

Continue reading "Things That Occurred To Me Tonight About 24" »

Posted by at 10:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to TV comedy writer Ken Levine, there is a meme going around that asks folks to name their ten favorite TV theme songs. Like Levine, who spins this meme into a fairly long rant about the demise of theme songs, I also miss the days when your favorite series was preceded by a memorable tune to help set the mood for whatever was to follow. The best theme songs always captured the tone of the show they represented and helped to hype you up and get you ready for your night's viewing, whether it was a comedy, a cop show, or a family drama. When a good theme song was combined with a well-designed visual sequence, they could be as entertaining as the show itself. I can think of a number of theme songs that are so inextricably linked in my mind with their accompanying visual images that I can't hear the music without imagining the picture, too -- for instance, the staccato opening of Miami Vice immediately conjures flamingoes and rushing water, and the bombastic first notes of Magnum's theme is always accompanied in my head by TC's little chopper dropping toward the surf in a vertiginous dive. And, as those two examples indicate, a good TV theme often turned up on the radio, too.

Continue reading "Favorite TV Theme Songs" »

Posted by at 5:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've run across something that I think makes for an interesting addendum to the Brokeback Mountain controversy, namely some comments from the author David Gerrold about last fall's revelation that Star Trek's George Takei is gay.

Gerrold, in case the name doesn't ring a bell, is an accomplished science-fiction author and television screenwriter with a number of novels to his name. Despite his lengthy career, however, he's most likely always going to be known as the man who wrote "The Trouble with Tribbles," the one episode of the original Star Trek series that non-Trekkies most frequently seem to be familiar with. Given the "Tribbles" connection, it shouldn't surprise you to learn that he's been friends with Mr. Takei -- and fully aware of George's sexuality -- for years. He also has strong feelings on the question of how visible homosexuals ought to be in our society (which is really what Larry Miller's decision on Brokeback -- as well as a certain political fight heating up in Utah's legislature -- is all about, the visibility of gay people and their relationships). Here's Gerrold:

Continue reading "Gerrold on Takei, and Other Related Matters" »

Posted by at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When the series 24 first premiered a few seasons back, I thought it was the most brilliant thing that'd been on television in a long, long time -- the conceit that each hour-long episode represented an hour of "real time" was clever and fresh, the suspenseful tone was pretty consistent, and even the plot of that first season was relatively realistic (if somewhat burdened with the "one damn thing after another" flavor of old cliffhanger serials, which, in a sense, is exactly what 24 is). It was also great to see Kiefer Sutherland, an actor I've enjoyed since his early roles in the 1980s, land a steady job and some critical respect.

However, I decided early on that show was something of a one-trick pony; after all, how many incredibly intense 24-hour crises in which the fate of the nation hangs in the balance could a single counter-terrorism agent realistically find himself in? One, maybe two in a single lifetime, but after that it would start getting harder and harder to accept that what we're watching is "real." Disbelief will only allow itself to be suspended so far. Call it the Die Hard 2 effect.

Continue reading "The Die Hard 2 Effect Hits 24" »

Posted by at 12:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This week I've been watching the long-form documentary film Country Boys on PBS. If you haven't seen it, I can't recommend it highly enough; it's utterly compelling television. And if you haven't heard about it, you obviously don't watch enough PBS because they've been advertising the hell out of it.

Continue reading "Genuine "Reality TV"" »

Posted by at 5:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Whoa, hold the phone! I've just run across something far more improbable even than a for-real hyperdrive! According to the official Web site of Bruce Campbell, the King of the B-Movies, Warner Bros. is actually going to release The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. on DVD!

Continue reading "Brisco!" »

Posted by at 5:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Seeing the recent movie Good Night, and Good Luck sparked my curiosity about the legendary newsman Ed Murrow, so I've been reading a book by former NPR host Bob Edwards called Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism. It's a short little volume, less an in-depth biography than a concise overview of Murrow's life and philosophies. Sparse as it is, though, the book provides plenty to think about. Consider, for instance, the following passage:

Continue reading "Unthinkable" »

Posted by at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Like I said yesterday, I've got a whole mess of topics I've wanted to write about but haven't gotten around to because of various distractions (like work -- curse the necessity of having a job, anyhow!) Unfortunately, some of these things are pretty old news by now.

For instance, you've probably already heard that George Takei, the actor who played Sulu on the original Star Trek, is gay. I don't have much to say about that, except that it certainly does explain a few things.

Continue reading "Misc. Trek-related Items" »

Posted by at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My employer has generously given me the week off, so between now and New Year's, I hope to clear the decks around here by blogging about a whole mess of topics and links that I've been gathering over the past few weeks.

First up is another of those list-style memes I occasionally run across, this one based around the number four. For your post-Christmas, Monday-morning amusement, I present the following bits of trivial information about yours truly:

Continue reading "Meme of Fours" »

Posted by at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Several of the bloggers I read daily are in a snit this afternoon because of news that the creatively bankrupt suits at the Disney Channel have decided to make Christopher Robin into a girl in an upcoming Winnie the Pooh TV series. The spokesperson for this astoundingly lame decision says that, "these timeless characters really needed a breath of fresh air," and the new series is not an "abandonment of an old, familiar world, but rather an alternate universe for Pooh and his crew."

Uh-huh. Alternate universe. Gotcha.

This is the sort of boneheaded, focus-group-driven nonsense that made the otherwise mediocre movie Office Space into a monster cult hit.

Here's a sampling of how people are reacting to this "breath of fresh air":

Continue reading "Christina Robin?" »

Posted by at 7:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Thanks to an assist from one of you lovely readers out there, I'm now able to show you Gary Coleman as he appeared in the Buck Rogers episode "Cosmic Wiz Kid," which first aired on November 15, 1979:

For the record, he hasn't changed much in the last 26 years. Well, aside from the crow's feet, a shorter haircut, and an improved sense of fashion, of course...

Posted by at 2:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've been googling around trying to find a photo of Gary Coleman as Heironymous Fox in that Buck Rogers episode I mentioned earlier. No luck on that front, but I did find this gem of an image:

This picture contains just about everything you need to know about television in the early '80s... I love it!

Posted by at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I've only recently become familiar with the TV series South Park, and I still haven't decided exactly what I think of it. I find that for every joke that connects with me during any given episode, there are three more that leaving me sitting in stony silence, wondering why in the hell I'm wasting my time with this vulgar crap. Still, the jokes that do connect are brutally effective, and there's also something oddly endearing about the look of the foul-mouthed main characters, crudely drawn and barely animated though they may be. Now, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I know what I would look like if I were magically transmogrified into a South Park kid:

So what do you think? Can't you just see the plush toys made from my cartoony likeness?

Posted by at 3:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

It's not really my thing, but if you enjoy Extreme Makeover: Home Edition or you just want to see ol' Bennion's home state on TV, tune in this Sunday night for an episode of the popular show that was shot in Bountiful, Utah. (For you out-of-staters, Bountiful is a bedroom community just north of Salt Lake.) You may recall that I wrote about this subject earlier this summer, while the TV folks were actually here. There's an article in today's Trib about the family featured in the episode, if you're interested.

Here locally, the show airs at 7 p.m. Sunday on KTVX Channel 4. Okay, commercial over; we now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging...

Posted by at 5:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

So, did everyone see last night's episode of Lost? I'm with Jack -- the underground station that looks like a leftover set from Gene Roddenberry's Genesis II is just a big psychology experiment. The reference to B.F. Skinner was a dead giveaway, and even if it wasn't, wouldn't it make more sense for the station's builders to automate the system that has to be reset every hour-and-a-half to avoid Total Global Destruction? Yep, no doubt in my mind: an experiment. And what the hell's up with Sawyer letting that little girlie girl take his gun? Getting shot in the shoulder must've caused his IQ to drop a few points... as Dr. Henry Jones, Sr., said under similar circumstances, "I didn't trust her; why did you?"

Posted by at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don't care, I'm still free
You can't take the sky from me
Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain't comin' back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can't take the sky from me
There's no place I can be
Since I found Serenity
But you can't take the sky from me...

--Opening theme from Firefly

Writer Joss Whedon reportedly pitched his television series Firefly as "the anti-Star Trek," so it's interesting to note that the show has followed a similar path as that classic series: unloved by network executives and cancelled before its time, Firefly, like Star Trek before it, spawned a fanatically loyal cult following that clamored for the show's return, which it did this weekend in the form of a Whedon-directed feature film, Serenity. The difference between Firefly and Star Trek, however, is that Trek ran three seasons in its original incarnation; it held a sizable presence in the collective pop-cultural memory even before years of syndication made it into a household name. Firefly, by contrast, lasted a mere ten episodes before it was canned, and only 14 episodes were actually filmed.

Think about that. Most series that fail to run a complete season (usually 22 episodes these days) vanish without a trace, quickly forgotten by a fickle viewing public. But this show, which didn't even make it half a season, somehow garnered enough attention after its death to come back on the Big Screen. Even if you don't give a womp-rat's exhaust port about cultish science-fiction media properties, that's got to impress you because it's so mind-bogglingly unlikely.

Continue reading "Movie Review: Serenity" »

Posted by at 6:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As a follow-up to the previous entry, I thought I'd direct you to some of the Muppet-related stuff I've run across on the Internets.

Continue reading "Muppet Links" »

Posted by at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What a sad coincidence -- the very same day I learn that the Muppets are going to be honored with a set of official U.S. postage stamps, I also learn that Jerry Juhl, one of the men who made the Muppets into the icons we all know and love, has died.

Continue reading "The Rainbow Connection" »

Posted by at 11:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Ever wonder what it's like to be win an Emmy Award for a television series you helped create? Javier Grillo-Marxuach, supervising producer for Lost, describes his big moment like this:

now i’m on stage. my thoughts – what am i talking about – what thoughts? my brain is like a hamster on red bull and meth. here is a sample of my brain activity during any given nanosecond and at the same time i was up there:

i wouldn’t be here if upn hadn’t cancelled “jake 2.0” in the middle of its run! thank you tyra banks for doing twice our first run number on a rerun of “america’s next top model” how is my wife going to find me after this? I AM HERE FOR THE GLORY OF QU’ONOS! do i get my own trophy? god, i love monkeys. the castaways should find a monkey and train it to be their butler. wolverine! SNCKT! monkey butler. chips would be nice. never be ru-uude to an arab! hey – that’s jj abrams! volare! whoa-oh! cantare! i remember a small band of three men i saw while vacationing in the island of bequia, they sang badly and their instruments were out of tune – but they had HEART! shatner was just here! shatner. the captain. hmmm. some dip would be nice with those chips. hey guinan? where’s the rest of the el-aurian refugees? I AM HE AND YOU ARE HE AND HE IS WE AND WE ARE ALL TOGETHER!

there is a little known fact that if you stay within three feet of the microphone during the emmy acceptance speech, you are in the tv zone and will be seen by the folks at home. since my parents were watching and admonished me to be visible, i planted myself in the safe zone and stayed there until guinan and wolverine ushered us out.

then it gets weird...

Weird indeed. There's a lot of geekiness in that excerpt, so here's a little help for the Muggles out there: when Javi refers to Guinan and Wolverine, he really means Whoopi Goldberg and Hugh Jackman, who played Guinan on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Logan/Wolverine in the X-Men movies, respectively. They were the presenters for this particular award. In Star Trek lore, Qu'onos (pronounced Kronos) is the Klingon homeworld, while "SNCKT" is how captions in the X-Men comics describe the sound of Wolverine's adamantium claws springing out of his hands. I leave it to you to figure out the miscellaneous song references.

If you're interested, the rest of Javi's experience at the Emmys is described in two massive (but highly entertaining) entries on his LiveJournal. Part One is here, and Part Two is here.

Happy Thursday!

Posted by at 1:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As if we didn't have enough to worry about these days, now the damn zombies are attacking the American Idol try-outs! Will the nightmare never end?

The mainstream media are curiously silent on the subject of zombism, but I understand there have been a number of similar attacks this summer. They're a new fad that's evolved from the "flash mob" phenomenon of a few years ago, in which a group of people quietly organize using the Internet, cell phones and other electronic means, show up simultaneously at the same public place, do something weird to attract attention, and then leave. While I always thought flash-mobbing sounded pretty pointless, the zombie-mob idea amuses me. The thought of badly made-up pretend-ghouls shambling around in broad daylight is so patently absurd that I imagine only the uptightest people could avoid smiling at the sight of them, and Lord knows we could all use a few smiles after reading the latest news from the Gulf Coast.

Incidentally, the American Idol producers were tipped off that this prank was in the offing, and they were ready for it. To their credit, they didn't meet the zombie mob with stern-faced security guards and cease-and-desist orders, but rather with a fistful of release forms. That's right, the new season of Idol is going to feature zombies as well as wanna-be pop-singers. Not that there's a lot of difference, of course...

Posted by at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

What does it say about me that I know more about Baby Boomer pop culture than my parents?

To explain: my folks don't have their own e-mail addresses, e-mail apparently being something akin to the arcane arts of blackest magic as far as they're concerned. That means that all their buddies who are e-literate tend to send their jokes and stories and other assorted spam to me, hoping that I will be a good son and relay it to the parental units. Most of the time I don't bother because very little of it is worth their time, or mine, either. (I especially despise the would-be heartstring-tuggers!) But every now and again something comes through that's kind of fun and worth passing along.

Case in point: a trivia quiz that arrived yesterday, composed of questions about TV, music, and historical events from the late 1950s and '60s. When I first opened the message, I was confident that I'd know quite a few of the answers, since I spent a good part of my childhood watching re-runs of the previous decade's television programming, but imagine my surprise when I got more of these correct than my parents. Obviously something is seriously amiss in the space-time continuum...

Here's the quiz, slightly edited by me for grammar and such:

Continue reading "Boomer Trivia" »

Posted by at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Dick Clark will be returning to Times Square this New Year's Eve. Even though the title of Clark's annual broadcast, Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve, hasn't been strictly accurate in years -- how much rocking can you really do with musical guests like Kool & the Gang? -- Clark on New Year's is an institution, and I, for one, missed seeing him last year. I know he can't last forever, despite all the jokes about him being an android; the linked article notes that Ryan "I have lousy taste in clothes and no discernable charisma" Seacrest is warming up to take over for Clark permanently. There'll be a time, probably not too distant now, when Dick Clark will be just one more old-school pop-cultural reference that garners blank stares from the whippersnappers. But in the meantime, I really hope ol' Dick's got a few more New Year's broadcasts left in him. We have so little continuity in our society these days, so few common points of reference, that we need to prolong the careers of our cheesy, beloved, old TV hosts as long as we possibly can...

Posted by at 9:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fans of the TV show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition may be interested to learn that the show is currently filming right here in Utah. Specifically, Bountiful, Utah, which, for you out-of-staters, is a quiet little burg just north of Salt Lake City.

Continue reading "Extreme Makeover: Utah Edition" »

Posted by at 4:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Being the devoted fanboy that I am, I've been monitoring the InterWeb Thingie over the past week to see what people have been saying about James "Scotty" Doohan. For anyone who may be interested, here are the highlights:

Continue reading "Come Back to the Engine Room, Jimmy Doohan, Jimmy Doohan" »

Posted by at 1:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For my local (or formerly local) readers, as well as anyone who may want a taste of the Utah action, here are a few interesting tidbits you may not have heard about:

Continue reading "Of Local Interest..." »

Posted by at 5:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

After reading the previous entry, a friend of mine e-mailed to let me know of someone else whose passing is worth noting: Shelby Foote, the soft-spoken Southern novelist and historian who became a minor-league celebrity after appearing in the landmark PBS series The Civil War. Foote died Monday at the age of 88.

Continue reading "Shelby Foote" »

Posted by at 12:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just to tie up a loose end, I see that British authorities have recovered that missing Dalek I wrote about last week. According to the BBC, the thieves decided the stolen prop was "too hot to handle" (i.e., they figured they were going to have a problem fencing it, or decided their original scheme wouldn't be so funny if it ended with them in handcuffs), so they dumped it on Glastonbury Tor and dropped a dime to let somebody know where it was. (According to the Wikipedia, a tor is a "large hill, usually topped with rocks," in the southwest of England.)

The owner of the tourist attraction from which the Dalek was taken denies that this whole event was a publicity stunt, and despite the offer of his services, the presence of Colin Baker was apparently not required.

Kind of a let-down, actually... I was hoping the thing would turn up in the middle of Piccadilly, dressed in a pink tu-tu or something.

Posted by at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

From the Department of Amusingly Daft Things That Total Fanboys Do on Larks (DADTTTFDL) comes a report that someone has stolen a Dalek from a British tourist attraction and is holding it for ransom. Daleks, in case you're not geeky enough to know, are the arch-enemies of the cult TV hero Doctor Who. A race of cyborg mutants encased in rolling shells that vaguely resemble giant fire hydrants, the Daleks are basically stock sci-fi villains in that they're always trying to take over the universe and kill any life-form they deem inferior to themselves (that would be all of them). (The Wikipedia has an insanely detailed entry on Daleks that includes photos, history, and social commentary on the "Dalek phenomenon," if you're interested.)

According to the news story, the missing Dalek is supposed to be an original prop from the BBC series and could be worth thousands of pounds. The "kidnappers" removed one of the prop's "arms" and left it on a doorstep with a ransom note that says they are "awaiting further instructions from the Doctor." Hopefully they're just kidding and don't really expect to be contacted by a time-travelling goofball... although that may happen, too, since the news story linked above notes that:

Former Dr. Who actor Colin Baker has been in touch with staff at the attraction, and may be asked to send a message to the kidnappers.

Could this all be an elaborate ruse cooked up just to meet a celebrity? Hard telling... I'll keep you posted with any follow-up news on this critical situation.

(Incidentally, I used to be a pretty major Who fan back in high school, and I actually met Colin Baker at a "meet-and-greet" autograph session way back in the glorious '80s. Charming fellow, very tall...)

Posted by at 3:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another actor familiar to fans of classic '60s television has passed away: Leon Askin, the squatty man with the bulldog face who constantly threatened to send Col. Klink to the Russian Front on Hogan's Heroes, died recently in his hometown of Vienna. He was 97 years old.

Continue reading "Yes, General Burkhalter?" »

Posted by at 11:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you're still hanging around the computer on this beautiful, sunny, pre-MemDayWeekend afternoon, you're more than likely looking out the window and longing for anything other than work to occupy your attention. Allow me to help by tossing out a few links I've been meaning to post for a while...

Continue reading "Friday Afternoon Reading" »

Posted by at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As I've said before, I was never a fan of Enterprise, the fifth and most-likely final televised incarnation of the venerable Star Trek media franchise. I didn't hate it. It just wasn't my cup of "tea, earl grey, hot." I watched three or four episodes when it premiered, saw that it looked like more of the tired old same, and decided to spend my valuable TV-viewing time on other things. A couple of friends who stuck with it say I really missed out on something good, that the show picked up in subsequent years and that, as an old-school Trekkie, I would've liked the homage-heavy final season. Maybe they're right. But I'll never know, because I couldn't break through my indifference long enough to give the show a second chance.

Nevertheless, I was somewhat curious about the series finale that aired last Friday. Not curious enough to watch it, apparently, because I forgot it was on, but I have wanted to know how the Trek franchise was going to end after so many years. (Yes, I do believe it's over, regardless of what the misguided optimists say about a new Star Trek series debuting after a "rest period." It's a beautiful dream, you crazy kids, god love ya. If it happens, I owe all of you a Coke.) Luckily, there's plenty of commentary about the finale floating around the blogosphere today, so I've been able to get a pretty good sense of how it all went down, both pro and con.

Continue reading "The Last Voyage of the Starship Enterprise" »

Posted by at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The previous entry on home theaters started me thinking about consumer video technology, specifically the preferred video format of the moment, the DVD.

I've been collecting DVDs for about five years now. I wasn't what you'd call an early adopter of the technology, but I did get in on it before it became hugely popular and started suffering the problems that inevitably come with ramped-up manufacturing and "lowest-common denominator" thinking. (Yes, I am a bit of a snob when it comes to these things, and I do think it's fair to say that DVD content and overall presentation was much smarter when the format was still a niche market. But that's a rant for another time.) At this point, I own roughly 230 unique DVD titles, comprising both movies and television programming, and I think my collection includes a pretty good sampling of product from all the major DVD producers, except maybe Disney. (I don't have kids and I'm not a big animation fan, so very few Disney offerings appeal to me.)

What's interesting about all of this -- aside from the value of idle boasting, of course -- is that the size and diversity of my collection has allowed me to recognize distinct differences in the product coming from each of the major labels. Just like each studio was known for making a particular kind of film back in Hollywood's Golden Age, so too are their modern descendents easy to equate with specific DVD characteristics.

Continue reading "Of Poor Quality and Big Stupid Cylon Heads" »

Posted by at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm probably going to bring down a rain of derision on myself for what I'm about to admit, but given that I'm on record here as defending both the Star Wars prequels and the original Battlestar Galactica, I doubt if I have much credibility left to lose. Therefore I'm going to come right out and say it loud and proud:

I'm a fan of William Shatner.

That's right, I'm talking about the same Shatner who played T.J. Hooker in the '80s, who appeared in the notoriously bad '70s horror film Kingdom of the Spiders, who recorded an equally notoriously bad album in the late '60s, and who has endured -- even among his most solid fanbase, the Trekkies -- a reputation for being an arrogant, clueless, and thoroughly unpleasant man.

None of that makes a bit of difference to me. I like him, or at least I like his work. Always have, since I was a small boy looking up to Shatner's signature role, Captain James T. Kirk, as my very first imaginary hero and friend. That's why it tickles me pink to see The Shat working regularly on TV again, and that he's finally regaining a little respect in his twilight years, thanks to his new-found ability to laugh at himself.

I'd like to recommend a short article about Shatner's odyssey through the post-Star Trek wilderness and back into the public eye. I think the title says it all: How William Shatner Went From Has-Been to Icon in Seven Self-Aware Steps.

It's an interesting read, even if you think The Shat's performances contain more ham than the average processed luncheon meat...

Posted by at 5:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Next week's TV Guide landed in my mailbox this morning and with it came the final results of that poll I mentioned awhile back, the one about various favorite and non-favorite aspects of the Star Trek franchise. As a public service for any of my readers who may care but don't have their own subscriptions to TVG, I will now post what America -- or at least the minority of it that votes in Internet polls -- had to say about these oh-so-important issues.

Continue reading "Trek Poll Results and Musings on TV Finales" »

Posted by at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As I promised at the end of the previous entry, I'd like to say a few things about Dirk Benedict's essay on the new Battlestar Galactica series. Be warned that things go off into some distinctly ranty territory toward the end. I didn't intend to rant when I first started writing this, but I got on a roll and managed to say a few things I've been trying to think of how to say, so take it or leave it at your discretion.

Continue reading "Thoughts on Starbuck's Thoughts" »

Posted by at 10:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The other night I was lurking on a message board, silently observing the continuing bloodshed between the Old-School Faithful and the Remake Upstarts over which version of the television show in question most deserves to be blown out an airlock. The links were flying fast and furious as each side tried to bolster their own insecure opinions with external references. It didn't take long before the links started looking more interesting than the pointless, unwinnable argument, so I clicked one of them. I found myself reading a year-old harangue by none other than Dirk Benedict, the actor who played the original (male) Starbuck in the '78 version of Battlestar Galactica.

(I know what you're thinking: aw, frak! Not another Battlestar Galactica entry! Not after that big long rambling review, and that angry rant last week, and all the references dropped into entries throughout the two months before that...

I don't blame you for feeling that way. But I think this is kind of interesting, so please bear with me.)

It's not a pretty piece of writing. From a technical standpoint, Dirk has a rather odd way of putting his thoughts together, and from a substance standpoint, he comes across as something of a male chauvinist. He's pretty bitter about the remake (at least he was when he wrote this), and some of his comments are, if I may say so, curiously Republican in tone. (I say "curiously" because I've always assumed Mr. Benedict, who is a well-known advocate for New Age-y macrobiotic diets, was one of them wacky California libruls. It seems he's a bit more complex than I have given him credit for.)

Still, he makes some good points, and I found the essay both amusing and thought-provoking. I couldn't find an original source for the essay, so I am reprinting it in its entirety here. Enjoy.

Continue reading "Starbuck's Thoughts" »

Posted by at 1:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I like it.

I didn't think I would. I even tried not to, out of loyalty to the series that I grew up with and still enjoy. But in the end (and to my surprise), I find that I actually do like the new Battlestar Galactica. It's a good series on its own terms, and it's also the rare example of a remake that improves on the original by taking it seriously.

That's not to say, however, that I like it without reservation. There are aspects of it that don't quite work for me, and, as I've already mentioned a couple of times, I'm not at all comfortable with the fact that this show is on track to replace the original in our collective pop-cultural memories. Nevertheless, I can't deny that Ron Moore, the driving force behind the remake, has created something that is honestly worthy of the attention the show is receiving.

Continue reading "Neo-Galactica, Part 3: The Review (At Last!)" »

Posted by at 6:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Before I proceed with my long-promised review of the new Battlestar Galactica remake series, there's something I want to get off my chest: I am really sick and tired of the way every article I read about the new show starts out by trashing the original series. What is it about American culture that we can't complement one thing without denigrating something else? It's almost like one of Newton's laws -- for every positive word spoken there must be an equal and opposite insult.

TV Guide is especially guilty of this kind of needless hostility. For example, in next week's issue, critic Matt Roush begins his comments about the new show's season ender by saying, "If anyone had predicted a year ago that I'd be hooked on a new version of Battlestar Galactica -- that cheesily juvenile and insipid 'Star Wars' wannabe from the late '70s -- I'd have laughed."

That sort of remark is all too common in the press on Neo-G, and it really pisses me off.

Continue reading "Neo-Galactica, Part 2: The Rant" »

Posted by at 4:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

Here's some news that's somewhat related to my previous post: TV Guide is conducting an on-line poll of the favorite (and least-favorite) Star Trek characters. The results will be announced in an April issue of the magazine, to coincide with the final episode of Enterprise and the likely end of "The Franchise."

So how, you may ask, does this relate to the previous post? Well, for many years now Wil Wheaton has borne the burden of having played Wesley Crusher, one of the least-liked regular characters in all of Trek history. I'm not a big Wesley fan myself, but if you read Wil's blog (or his highly entertaining memoir, Just a Geek), you'll soon discover just how vile supposedly grown-up human beings can be. Wil has taken a lot of crap over the years because of Wesley, including death threats and fanboy wishes for his character -- and by extension, himself -- to get