Another Thanksgiving-related Public Service announcement: Try to avoid dropping a frozen turkey on your foot or your pets. You know, just in case you were planning on doing that for grins. At the very least you might want to wear shoes when you pull that sucker out of the freezer.
Dwight and I were watching episodes of Night Gallery, and in addition to the extremely good “They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar” (with a fine turn by the late William Windom), we also watched “The Last Lecture of Mr. Peabody,” in which a professor of comparative religion lectures on The Great Old Ones, including reading aloud from the Necronomicon, with somewhat predictable results. The Mythos is mostly played for laughs and in-jokes (including students named Lovecraft, Bloch and Derleth), but it may be the first time the name Cthulhu was ever mentioned on network television.
It’s a little broad, but it does have its charms:
The episode was written by Jack Laird, who seems to have adapted a number of Lovecraft stories for Night Gallery.
A deeper appreciation (and the nifty following screen grab) can be found here.
I checked out of Family Guy when it stopped being funny, which was shortly after the OJ Simpson episode. But I must admit, this shroomed-out Brian visiting his own personal hell is nicely creepy.
I know that when I think “punk,” Huey Lewis and Toni Basil are the first names that come to mind:
I can hardly wait for their forthcoming Heavy Metal collection with Simon & Garfunkel and The Bee Gees.
(To be fair, Devo were considered punk very early in their career, and Billy Idol at least dressed the part and came out of the same scene as The Sex Pistols. There’s a very amusing bit in Glen Matlock’s I was a teenage Sex Pistol in which a suddenly chastised Idol grows apprehensive over having wrecked his father’s car…)
But there’s no reason this idea can’t succeed in the U.S. Why not have Freddy Kruger, Leatherface, Jason or Pinhead throw out the first pitch? Granted, this still wouldn’t be enough to get me to watch baseball…
We now interrupt this blog for some shameless huxtering: Amazon has the complete 6-episode run of the wonderful and completely insane anime series FLCL on Blu-Ray for $18.99.
This is probably my favorite anime series of all time. It’s weird, funny, and endlessly inventive. You spend 5 episodes thinking “This is great, but it makes absolutely no sense!” And then you watch the sixth episode and go “Wait, it does make sense!” It really rewards re-watching.
It’s about a boy a who has a mysterious woman bump into and then start hitting on him. That is to say, bumps into him with her Vespa at full tilt and starts hitting on his head with her bass guitar. After that, giant robots come out of the resulting bump.
Then it gets weird.
It’s awesome. Trust me.
And if a paying media outlet wants an already completed review of FLCL that Locus Online passed on, please let me know…