Charlie Sheen.
Lindsay Lohan.
On Broadway.
In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?.
Charge $500 a ticket and it will still sell out a three month run.
Get on it, Broadway producers! There’s gold in them thar freaks!
Archive for the ‘TV’ Category
Million Dollar Idea
Thursday, March 17th, 2011He’s Mister Heat Miser
Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember the Rankin Bass production of A Year Without a Santa Claus. Like all the other warhorse Christmas specials of my youth, it got trotted out pretty much every year.
All the works of Rankin Bass are hard to evaluate separate from the nostalgia factor they invoked. On a level of technical proficiency, they weren’t particularly proficient. At it’s very best, their animation was of the quality of Hanna-Barbera, which is to say it sucked, and their stop motion work was more stop than motion. (I have not seen their animated film version of Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, which I am given to understand is better.)
For an example of both good and bad, take a look at the classic “Snow Miser/Heat Miser” songs from A Year Without a Santa Claus:
I don’t think the lyrics of that songs are going to be taught in songwriting classes (it takes a special type of lyricist to rhyme “degrees” with “degrees”), but damned if that song doesn’t stick in your head. Go up to just about anyone from my generation and sing “He’s Mr. Heat Miser,” and you’re virtually guaranteed to have them sing back “He’s Mr. Sun.” (Who was it that said “Memory is a crazy beggar woman that hordes bright bits of tinfoil and throws away food”?)
Whatever their flaws, Rankin Bass productions usually had a few bits of cleverness and interest scattered throughout.
The same can not necessarily be said of the cheap spinoffs done of their work. Did you know that they did a live action remake of A Year Without a Santa Claus? If you think to yourself, “Wow, that sounds like a really, really bad idea,” you’re not the only one.
As proof, take a look at this:
Well, Snow Miser can certainly sing, and Heat Miser…uh, goes a long way toward making Snow Miser’s singing sound that much better.
And this…this is Just. Freaking. WRONG:
It’s like if Ralphie from A Christmas Story came back at age 35 to do an infomercial for winterizing your home. Yes, it’s from the sequel to the original A Year Without a Santa Claus, A Miser Brothers Christmas, and, if this clip is any indication, it looks to be as fondly remembered as The Christmas That Totally Ruled and KISS Saves Santa.
Stop. Just stop.
I leave you with one other Rankin Bass piece of music, the high point of their otherwise-not-even-remotely-fondly-remembered version of The Return of the King:
Retro TV Memories: The Fantastic Journey
Sunday, February 13th, 2011Back in my ill-spent youth, before we had any video games other than Pong, I watched a lot of TV. Along with the classics (I Love Lucy, Star Trek), I watched a good bit of the same primetime fare everyone else watched back in the days of three broadcast networks and no cable. In particular, I would watch pretty much any prime time science fiction show in the 1970s, no matter how bad. Some, like Kolchak: The Night Stalker, hold up much better than I would expect them to.
I’m pretty sure The Fantastic Journey does not, mainly because I remember thinking that it sucked even while I was watching it. I even remember thinking it sucked more than The Man From Atlantis, which, I assure you, sucked pretty hard. (After all, that was a show with an episode that had Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as an alien on another planet panning for gold in invisible water. And no, it didn’t make any more sense in context.)
Anyway, I thought I’d do this post on The Fantastic Journey not because it was good, but because once every six months or so I found myself discussing the TV shows of the 1970s and being unable to recall the name of the show. It could also be seen as some sort of weird precursor to Lost, but with a smaller cast and a refreshing lack of tedious flashbacks. So this page is more or less something for people to find on the Internet searching for the same half-remembered plot elements just so they can prove to their friends that no, they didn’t imagine it. (Keywords: The Fantastic Journey, island, Bermuda Triangle, zone, portal, TV show, 1970s, bad, suck)
The setup, as I remember it, was some modern Americans (including an annoying kid, which was the style at the time) being marooned on an uncharted island somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle, and every week they’d go through some sort of zone or barrier that would transport them to another time period where they ran into pirates, aliens, future civilizations, or any other thing 70s TV writers on deadline could think of to keep them in cocaine for another month. According to this far more informative writeup on the show, they were stranded there by some weird green cloud enveloping their boat. And it went downhill from there.
Here’s the opening credits, which I seem to have mercifully forgotten:
Wow, that cheesy disco synth theme is everything that was wrong with music in the 1970s rolled into one excruciatingly painful package. I’m sure that right now, it’s being played on an infinite loop to torments the souls of the damned at Hell’s own disco.
And here’s the opening of one episode, which makes it seem even worse than I remember:
Roddy McDowell adds that touch of class to remind you that, yes, he was in an awful lot of horrid crap. (See also: Laserblast.)
That’s pretty bad. Thanks you sir, may I have another?
What that scene really needs is the Monty Python knight to limp up and whack Mongol Riddle Guy upside the head with a rubber chicken. There also seemed to be a contractual requirement for several minutes of running in every show. (Cheap! Pointless! Eats up screen time!) And nothing says “It’s the future!” like green unitards and shiny, asymmetrical skirts.
And there’s plenty more where that came from on YouTube, for those with an unquenchable thirst for cheesy 70s science fiction TV shows. But everything about the show gives you the distinct impression people involved knew it was doomed and were only in it for the paycheck.
Here’s the IMDB link for the show.
Let’s face it: The Fantastic Journey was just a big slab of suck, and I only post this here as a warning to others and to prove that, yes, it actually existed.
Tune in next week when I channel my vague memories of John Saxon blowing up mutants with a photon bazooka (or some damn thing).
The Wire as Documentary
Wednesday, January 26th, 2011It’s always dangerous to assume that any fictional work accurately reflects reality, be it movie, TV show, or novel. But some works come a lot closer than others.
HBO’s The Wire rings truer to me than most, not primarily because of the gritty, noir depiction of urban crime and a dysfunctional, overworked police department, but because they accord very closely with creator David Simon’s excellent non-fiction work from which they draw, Homicide: A Year in the Killing Streets (also the basis of the NBC TV show) and (with Edward Burns) The Corner.
Well, here’s Simon delivering a righteous smackdown to Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III over his assertion that the show was a “smear that will take decades to overcome”:
Others might reasonably argue, however, that it is not 60 hours of “The Wire” that will require decades for our city to overcome, as the commissioner claims. A more lingering problem might be two decades of bad performance by a police agency more obsessed with statistics than substance, with appeasing political leadership rather than seriously addressing the roots of city violence, with shifting blame rather than taking responsibility. That is the police department we depicted in “The Wire,” give or take our depiction of some conscientious officers and supervisors. And that is an accurate depiction of the Baltimore department for much of the last 20 years, from the late 1980s, when cocaine hit and the drug corners blossomed, until recently, when Mr. O’Malley became governor and the pressure to clear those corners without regard to legality and to make crime disappear on paper finally gave way to some normalcy and, perhaps, some police work.
And here’s a former Baltimore police officer backing him up on it: “As a former Baltimore police officer for 11 years, I can attest to the fact that much of what appears in the HBO series “The Wire” is a very accurate depiction of reality both on the street and within the Baltimore Police Department.”
As for the greater issue of why Baltimore crime remains stubbornly high, why the drug problem remains so intractable (I’m in the “legalize it, regulate it, and tax it” camp), and why the “broken window” policing Mayor Rudy Guiliani used to bring down New York’s historically high crime rates has not (could not? can’t?) be used in Baltimore is a topic far beyond the scope of this blog (and my own expertise, formidable as it may (or may not) be).
Disclaimer of the Year
Tuesday, January 11th, 2011The views and opinions expressed by GWAR do not reflect those of The Pentagon Channel or the Department of Defense
Well, thank God they cleared that up. I just naturally assumed that the views of a 1980s metal band in alien monster costumes did indeed reflect the opinions of the Defense Department of the United States of America, and will have to adjust my opinions on overseas base closing strategies appropriately. In light of this shocking revelation, I must also reconsider my long-held beliefs that Motley Crüe reflected the official views of the Secretary of State for events in southeast Asia, and that the pronouncements of H.R. Pufnstuf adequately reflected official Department of Energy policy on building additional nuclear power plants…