TV Title Sequences: Booker

It’s been a while since I posted a TV Title Sequence, and there’s one that’s been on my mind the last couple days. As it happens, this one is very MTV-esque, so it can double as a Friday Evening Video, for those who enjoy those and missed seeing one this week… two for the price of one! Just another little favor from your friends here at Simple Tricks and Nonsense!

If you don’t remember it — and really, why should you? — Booker was a short-lived spin-off from 21 Jump Street, that early hit for the fledgling Fox network that brought Johnny Depp to the public’s attention. As I understand it — and I could be totally offbase here, as I was never more than a casual fan and occasional viewer of Jump Street — Depp started talking about leaving the series early on in its five-season run and Richard Greico, who had a similar look, was brought on in the third season as a possible replacement for him. When Greico’s character, Dennis Booker, proved to popular and Depp was placated by some behind-the-scenes negotiations, Booker got his own show, which lasted a single season. (Depp ended up leaving Jump Street at the end of the fourth season, which coincided with the end of Booker‘s run as well.)

Although I generally enjoyed Jump Street, I never got into Booker much. Greico annoyed me on an almost cellular level, no doubt because of the way my girlfriend at the time used to react whenever his face popped up somewhere. (I was so easily threatened by virtual competition from media heartthrobs in those days, and I was so not a Richard Greico type, that I couldn’t help but loathe the guy on general principles. I had similar issues with Johnny Depp back then, and several members of Duran Duran as well.) It didn’t help that the only episode of Booker that made an impression on me was such a blatant rip-off of Die Hard that I’m amazed nobody got sued. But the opening credits… ah, I liked the opening. I used to tune in every week just to catch that one-minute sequence, and then I’d go find something else to do. It’s a near-perfect marriage of sound and imagery, in my opinion.

The sound is Billy Idol’s “Hot in the City,” of course, specifically the “Exterminator Remix” from the 1987 compilation album Vital Idol. Billy Idol was another one I didn’t much like at the time — I’ve since come to appreciate him quite a bit — but this song was awesome. Strangely enough, the official music video for the song bears a lot of resemblance to Booker‘s opening credits. Apparently Bruce Willis movies weren’t the only thing the producers were ripping off. I can’t find an embeddable clip, but you can see the Idol video here.

And just as a bonus, here’s the music video for the original version of “Hot in the City,” which was first released in 1982:

I like the original, but this is a rare, rare case in which I think I prefer the remix. I like that pounding bass line at the beginning…

Aug052010

100 SF Books Everyone Should Read

No doubt my teenage self would be surprised and disappointed to learn this, but the truth is I don’t read a lot of science fiction anymore, and even when I did, my interests tended toward the less-respectible, less-than-serious stuff: movie tie-ins, old pulp heroes like Doc Savage and John Carter, and space opera. So-called “hard” SF or the tomes with literary and/or philosophical aspirations rarely caught my interest. Which means I’m usually at something of a disadvantage when I’m confronted by those lists of the Great Works that occasionally circulate, because I just haven’t read many of the Great Works. Even so, I always feel the compulsion to throw in my two cents anyway because, you know… they’re lists. And lists, by their very existence, demand that you comment on them, because they’re inevitably just some other person’s ideas of what constitutes greatness, and we all know that mileage varies. Especially when you’re contrary by nature, as I tend to be.

Anyhow, here’s one such list of 100 SF books that everyone supposedly needs to read, discovered and meme-ized by the always-reliable Jaquandor. Following his lead, I shall bold the titles I’ve read, italicize those I own but haven’t gotten around to reading, and color red the ones I do not own but hope to read one of these days. I’ve also added a twist by striking out the handful of titles that I know I never want to read. And of course, there will be commentary. So… onward!

Aug032010

Happy Birthday, Duckie

Aren’t we a pair, raggedy girl?

Aug022010

Prerequisites

The other day, my dad, watching me make a sandwich while my kitty-boys twined themselves around my legs and tried to coax me into dropping some lunchmeat into their greedy, adorable little paws, made the following quip:

“Anyone who thinks they’re ready to be a parent ought to try living with three cats first.”

You know, every once in a while, Dad displays a startling level of insight.

***

(Incidentally, have I mentioned I have three cats now? I didn’t set out to become a crazy cat guy or anything, but the way this situation developed… Basically, this new female cat showed up in our barn a couple years ago. She was obviously young and, although a bit stand-offish, much friendlier than the usual transient barn cats we get around the Bennion Compound. Our working hypothesis is that she had been somebody’s pet, rather than a feral animal, and some jackass didn’t want her anymore and dumped her, and then she somehow found her way to us. Well, there are a lot of other cats in the neighborhood and it didn’t take long before the poor thing was knocked up and very, very confused and unhappy. As I said, she appeared to be young, and possibly didn’t understand what’d happened to her. In the past, when the feral cats who hang around have had kittens, my parents and I haven’t found them until they were already mobile and quite wild. In this case, mother and children were accessible, and irresistible in the wake of Shadow’s death not long before. Three of the kittens ended up imprinting on me. Evinrude, Hannibal, and Jack — a.k.a. my kitty-boys — are now indoor-outdoor cats who pretty much have the run of the Compound, while their mother mostly stays out in the barn and wants as little to do with her brood as possible. And somehow, just like that, I’m a crazy cat guy.

I won’t mention Mom and Dad’s two cats, who bring the grand total around the Compound to six. Shadow would no doubt be appalled if he knew his territory had been overrun with the other kind. And yes, animal activist types, they’ve all been fixed.)

Aug022010

Decisions, Decisions

Scanning around the TV dial this morning while eating my Post Cherry Almond Crunch — I highly recommend that stuff, by the way; it’s available in jumbo boxes from Costco — I had quite a range of viewing options. I could have watched Good Morning, America blathering about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding; The Today Show blathering about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding dress; The Early Show on CBS blathering about some missing kid whose stepmom is the prime suspect in his disappearance; or Pork Chop Hill, an old war movie starring Gregory Peck and featuring Norman Fell — a.k.a. Mr. Roper from Three’s Company — in a supporting role.

Guess which one I ended up watching?

Aug012010

Our Little Girl Is All Grown Up

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…)

Jul312010

Friday Evening Videos: “Kiss Me Deadly”

I’ve been planning for a couple of weeks to post a clip of Harry Chapin performing “Taxi,” a lengthy ballad about disappointment and thwarted childhood ambitions, but you know what? Screw that. I’m not in the mood to dwell on my dissatisfaction right now. It’s a hot, muggy summer night in the SLC, the kind of night when young people go out on the prowl, and we middle-aged types reminisce about the crap we somehow managed to get away with, back in our own prowling days. So instead of that downer ’70s tune, I’m going back to the genre I turn to when I need a pick-me-up, the dumb and lustful pop-metal that I absorbed like oxygen in my late teens and early 20s. Here’s a song I can’t begin to justify liking, but I do, and I won’t apologize for it. It’s by Lita Ford, another former member of The Runaways who had a few solo hits in the late ’80s, including a pretty big duet she performed with Ozzy Osbourne. The song is “Kiss Me Deadly,” and no, it has nothing to do with Mickey Spillane:

I don’t have any specific memories associated with this song, other than liking it a lot when it was first out. I still have a 45 of it down in the Archives somewhere that features a rather fetching photo of Ms. Ford on the sleeve — she’s naked except for her guitar, which is naturally positioned just so to hide everything. I think it was that flavor of blunt sexuality that drew me to this song, actually… the line about getting laid and the one about knowing what she likes… I don’t think I’d ever heard a woman sing about sex in such frank, almost masculine terms before. Certainly it was a far cry from the fragile romanticism and opaque metaphors of Stevie Nicks. And I thought it was pretty hot.

Hot just like this miserable night. Going to be a long one, I think…

Jul302010

Happy Trails

When I was seven years old, my parents and I embarked on that great American ordeal — um, that is tradition — that figures so prominently in the lore of many families, the California Road Trip. Naturally, given my age at the time, I was utterly preoccupied by the mystical siren-song of Disneyland, but we also hit a lot of other attractions along the way, some well-known, some not so much, and a few that were masterpieces of good old-fashioned roadside kitsch. In the latter category, I’m thinking of the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum, located on the legendary Mother Road, Route 66, in Victorville, CA. Not that I knew what Route 66 was back in those days. I didn’t know what kitsch was either, and I certainly didn’t know who Roy Rogers and Dale Evans were. But my parents did — Roy and Dale were as much a part of my mom and dad’s childhoods as Captain Kirk and Spock were to mine — and they were as giddy as kids themselves when we pulled our 1970 T-Bird into an empty parking lot in what seemed to me like the hottest, most desolate place in the world. (This was years before I visited Phoenix!)

The museum didn’t look like much from the outside, merely a plain, warehouse-style building with a tremendous statue of a prancing horse out front. I would soon learn that the statue was of Roy’s famous pal Trigger, and its pose mirrored the one exhibit I still clearly remember from our visit to that place: the taxidermied remains of the real Trigger, standing on display like a life-size action figure on a collector’s shelf. There were other mounted animals there as well — Roy’s dog Bullet, and Dale’s horse Buttermilk — but it was Trigger that commanded all the attention in the room, even from an ignorant kid like myself.

Jul302010

A Little Advice

To the spammer who hit Simple Tricks hard in the wee hours this morning:

Telling me that my blog “sucks big black ass” over and over and over again is not an effective way to get me onboard with your ill-conceived marketing scheme. Not that I’d do it anyhow, but there’s no way I’m going to publish your offensive and most likely virus-ridden little URL after being repeatedly insulted.

I’m just sayin’.

Now kindly go screw yourself while I delete your 200 pointless wastes of bandwidth.

That is all.

J-

Jul292010

Call It What You Want, It’s Still a Damned Remake

News today that a “contemporized adaptation” of the Arnold Schwarzenegger-on-Mars flick Total Recall is in the works. Never mind the question of whether the world is clamoring for yet another version of yet another story that’s already been told, or whether this particular story might benefit from being told again.* No, the thing that bugs me here is this obnoxious piece of jargon, “contemporized adaptation.” That, my friends, sounds to me like a marketing department trying to find some clever new way of saying “remake” without using the prefix “re-.” Because, I suppose, market research indicates that words beginning with “re-” too clearly state the obvious. “Reimagining,” “relaunch,” “reboot” — they all stink of a trip back to the same well, don’t they? So instead of using one of those words, dripping with all the negative connotations of creative bankruptcy, somebody sat around a conference table for hours to come up with this all-new term for the same old crap.

I can just imagine the pitch meeting for Total Recall, Take Two: A guy in a 5,000-dollar suit listens for a minute, then says with a slight, vaguely reptilian grin, “Wait a minute, this is just another bloody remake, right? We’ve done dozens of those in the last decade, why should I greenlight another one? Can’t you give me something original?” And he’s answered with, “No, no, it’s not a remake… it’s a contemporized adaptation.” And then, since Studio Suits are so easily dazzled by multisyllabic words, the first guy nods and says, “Oh, well, then, that sounds swell. Here’s a blank check.”

Guys, let me tell you something: it doesn’t matter how you say it. It doesn’t matter how you justify it. The fact is, you’re out of ideas. You’re lazy, you’re overly cautious, and you care more about extending brands than telling stories. And every one of these “contemporized adaptations” you keep cranking out just further proves my point. You know what? At this point, just remake it all, every movie from the last 50 years, and the sooner the better, because then maybe when it’s all been done over with sparkly CG effects and processed into murky 3D for maximum gimmick-appeal, we can get back to actually, you know, making movies, the kind you don’t have to make up words to describe.

Remakes. Grrr.

* For the record, I’m not really that big a fan of Total Recall. In fact, I outright loathed it when it was first released back in my old working-at-the-multiplex days. I don’t much enjoy “mind-f**k” movies anyhow, the ones that want to leave you guessing about what’s really happening to the characters and what’s only in their heads, and Recall was a pretty clumsy example of that genre. It was also ridiculously, cartoonishly violent (or so it seemed to me at the time; I’ve since seen worse), and it was just plain stupid in a lot of places. I could buy the alien instant-atmosphere-making machine, but Arnold and Rachel Ticotin looking completely unscathed in the final scene after having their eyes bugged four inches out of their skulls and then getting explosively recompressed? Uh, no. And don’t tell me this is proof that the whole movie was Arnold’s dream/memory implant. I already told you, I don’t like that mind-f**k crap. (I also dislike novels with unreliable narrators; I don’t like the feeling of some writer somewhere having a laugh at my expense.)

The biggest problem with Recall, though, is that it has no third act. Following a reasonably good set-up and middle portion, the writers obviously couldn’t figure out how to end it, so they just have Arnold shoot a bunch of people. Even though I hate remakes on general terms, you can actually make a pretty good argument in favor of remaking this one, assuming someone has come up with a solution to the problem of the third act. But of course, I don’t believe anyone has. Because most screenplays these days aren’t even as good as the dumb popcorn movies of the late ’80s and early ’90s.

And you know, now that I think about it, my attitude toward Total Recall has softened a lot in the last 20 years. Memories of it are bound up with memories of a good time in my life. And, as stupid as it was, it was still more entertaining than something like The Dark Knight. I’m really tired of all the Darkness with a capital D being sold as artistic significance in movies these days…

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