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…
If going to see John Tucker Must Die with a thirteen-year-old wasn’t enough to make me feel old and out-of-touch, the news that MTV is 25 years old today is.
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…
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.
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:
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…
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.
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.
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:
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.]