Neil Gaiman will be appearing on The Simpsons this Sunday. Neil has been mentioning it for a while, but this week is when it actually airs.
And here he is on Craig Ferguson talking about the episode:
Posts Tagged ‘TV’
Neil Gaiman to be on The Simpsons this Sunday
Thursday, November 17th, 2011Worst Cartoon Character of All Time?
Wednesday, July 20th, 2011Here’s a list of the 21 Worst Cartoon Characters Of All Time. They got number one right. The rest of the list is more mixed, but I haven’t seen all the cartoons on it.
In the interests of gathering a more complete sample, here’s a poll for the worse cartoon character of all time. Some are from that list, and some I came up with on my own. Add any additional nominees in the comments.
Von Neumann’s Cleaning Catastrophe
Thursday, March 24th, 2011I’m getting ready to purchase a new HDTV. (In fact, this will be the first television I’ve actually bought, as opposed to being a hand-me-down. From this you may correctly infer that I’m a cheapass tightwad very frugal. I’m also not a bleeding edge consumer, and have a very high saving throw vs. shiny.) So I thought I should vacuum before I got the new TV. But before I could vacuum I needed to put up some of the odds and ends that had accumulated in the room, such as CDs, DVDs, equipment boxes, etc. But before I could do that, I needed to move some things around in the guest room so I could move some things in there. But before I could do that, I needed to box up some old computer equipment. But before I could do that…
Anyway, it was like the punchline to a Dilbert strip: Thanks to proper ordering, I almost vacuumed something. The curse of the semi-clean and semi-organized…
He’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).
Chewing on Bob’s Burgers
Monday, January 10th, 2011So, I finished watching Bob’s Burgers, and thought I would delay writing about it until today because I’m incredibly lazy I wanted to ruminate on it for a while. The short description is: It’s not great. Not awful, but not great.
A few random thoughts:
- Right now it seems more than a little generic (family with three kids: lord knows we’ve never seen that on a Fox animated Sunday show).
- The setup (small business owner vs. the bureaucracy) has the potential to be good, but most of the restaurant gags already seem stale.
- I like two of the three kids, but the quiet girl and the father don’t do much for me.
- The mother, with her generic New York Jewish Mother accent, does less than nothing for me. If you talk like that, you damn well better look like Fran Drescher if you want people west of the Hudson to endure your voice.
- The edgy stuff (the suggestions of cannibalism, the funny daughter putting up a notice for a hamburger special called The Child Molester (“it comes with candy on the side”)) didn’t bother me (after all, I watch South Park), but the “can’t remember my wedding anniversary/old boyfriend” business was so old it might have been written by Henny Youngman. (No, scratch that; if Henny Youngman had written it, it would have been funnier.)
- Every now and then there was a funny bit, but there weren’t enough of them.
- I don’t want to write it off entirely, because the first episodes of animated shows frequently suck (have you watched “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” recently?); it might very well get better.
- I was able to watch all of it, unlike Sit Down, Shut Up (I’m amazed that lasted all of four episodes).
- It’s still better than The Cleveland Show, which I couldn’t last beyond the first commercial break of the premiere, and even that took willpower. Every time since I’ve happened to catch part of it, something would make me turn it off before two minutes had passed. It seems that every time Seth McFarlane creates a new show, his old shows become half as funny. Which is why I gave up on Family Guy shortly after the O.J. Simpson episode.
I’ll probably watch the next episode of Bob’s Burgers, but if it doesn’t improve I expect it to fall off my list well before Fox axes it 6-8 weeks from now…
Bob’s Burgers: Flash 1/3rd of the Way In Report
Sunday, January 9th, 2011So it’s the first commercial break for Bob’s Burgers, the new animated show after The Simpsons on Fox. So far, I’m sort of enjoying it, not because it’s great (it’s OK: moderately funny, too predictable), but simply because it’s not The Cleveland Show…
Classic Thanksgiving Traditions
Thursday, November 25th, 2010Not Going to the Austin Comic Con
Thursday, November 11th, 2010As I’m going to be busy watching Skyline (another movie Howard and I are reviewing) and they didn’t have any literary SF guests, I won’t be going to The Austin Comic Con (though I have friends who are going). But they do seem to have rounded up a surprisingly large number of 70s TV stars (plus Chewbacca, Darth Maul, Billy Dee Williams and, err, the cast of The Film I Refuse to Name). (And I’ve already met Lee Majors, for certain values of “met” that include “have your hand touched briefly as you walk past in a line with 10,000 other kids and their parents at a Toys”R”Us opening in the 1970s.” Also “met” William Shatner that way. I wonder when Toys”R”Us stopped hiring TV celebrities for store openings?)
But I must admit I’m a little bit tempted to go just to meet Oscar Goldman.
Oh, and here’s a hint for the Austin Comic Con Webmaster: if you’re going to copy text out of a Wikipedia entry, it’s usually best to take out the “[citation needed]” bit…
Playboy Playmate, Star Trek Actress Charged With Murder
Thursday, October 21st, 2010Dwight mentioned this but didn’t blog about it: Former 1968 Palyboy Playmate of the Year Angela Dorian (AKA Victoria Rathgeb, AKA Victoria Vetri) has been charged with attempted murder for shooting her boyfriend during an argument.
What he didn’t mention was that she also appeared on an episode of Star Trek, among other shows. (She even appeared in Rosemary’s Baby.)
Hat tip: Ace of Spades‘s newsfeed.