On most mornings these days, my dad wanders up to my place from the other side of the Bennion Compound, a steaming cup of coffee in his hand, and spends a few minutes chatting with me in the driveway before I leave for work. Today’s conversation was all about the TV show he’s recently discovered, The Walking Dead. Here’s his take on it:
“Yeah, so there’s these dead guys that come after you and the only way to stop ’em is to shoot ’em in the head… which doesn’t make any damn sense to me, because they’re already dead, right? How do you kill something that’s already dead? For that matter, why are they walking around if they’re dead, anyhow?”
He took a sip of his coffee, then chuckled.
“It’s pretty stupid, really.”
Good thing he’s not paid by the word for his reviews…
This past Monday, September 22, was the 20th anniversary of a little sitcom you may have heard of called Friends. Can you believe that? Twenty years since the world was introduced to Chandler, Joey, Ross, Rachel, Monica and… whatever Lisa Kudrow’s character was called. I’m afraid I was never much of a fan of this show.
In fact, I recall being pretty hostile toward Friends for much of its run, mostly because everyone else was fawning about it all the time. I’m contrary that way; I tend to reject whatever seems to be the big flavor of the moment, whether it’s grunge music or In ‘n’ Out Burger or all the grim-n-gritty made-for-cable-TV dramas today, simply on basic principles. In the case of Friends, I remember getting my nose out of joint early on because I’d seen so many articles praising the show for capturing the personality and challenges of Generation X. At the time, I was very conscious of my identity as a member of that beleaguered demographic, and I simply couldn’t see it. I didn’t relate to the characters on the show, who as far as I could tell spent a lot of time talking about their struggles but didn’t really seem to have any. How could they, when they obviously had so much leisure time to burn hanging out in a coffee shop while living beyond their means in unrealistically spacious Manhattan apartments? Meanwhile, my real-life friend who lived in Manhattan at the time was crammed into a studio the size of walk-in closet, for which he paid more per month than I earned in two. In other words, Friends struck me as an offensive fantasy, and it angered me that the people who assess such things for a living (no doubt a better living than I had!) believed it was in any way representative of my experience as a Gen-Xer.
Yes, I was taking a mere sitcom far too seriously. What can I say, I was a very serious-minded young man, and very touchy about my own difficulties getting started in life. But time has a way of softening one’s perspective, or broadening it, or both, and when I’m channel-surfing late at night and stumble across a re-run of Friends, sometimes I will stop and watch. I still don’t think it’s especially funny, although I often find myself chuckling at Joey, who reminds me of another big cheerful lug I know. But it does remind me of a time in my life that, despite being hard to get through while I was actually living it, now seems a lot more innocent than it did then. Nostalgia is a curious thing, isn’t it?
The funny thing is, whether or not the show actually captured what Gen X was then, it wove itself into the fabric of what we are now. It’s one of those shows that define an era by dint of running so long in the background of our lives, and by being so popular that even people who don’t watch it come to know it, at least to one degree or another. And as a student of popular culture, I have to acknowledge and respect its significance in that regard. Also, the theme song, at least, really did get at the essence of what I was going through in my twenties, if only I hadn’t been so reactionary that I refused to see it.
Incidentally, our colleague Jaquandor, who is a tremendous fan of the show and quite good at analyzing why things do or do not work, posted a few thoughts the other day that are worth a read. It was his post, actually, that got me thinking about doing one of my own…
One of the weirder things about being an aging nerd is seeing certain dates that have great fictional significance pass without anything happening here in the real world. For instance, who among us kids from the 1970s did not feel a twinge when 1987 came and went without seeing the launch of Ranger 3, the “last of America’s deep-space probes?” Surely I’m not the only fanboy out there who actually felt a little nervous on the morning of August 29, 1997, known to lovers of a certain film franchise as Judgment Day? And I can’t wait until next year arrives, and everyone on Facebook starts grumbling about how the real 2015 looks nothing like Back to the Future Part II (they’ve already been doing that, actually, due a couple of memes that falsely identify this year as the one Marty McFly visits; apparently the meme-makers didn’t pay attention when they were watching the film, or their math skills suck, i.e., 30 years from 1985 does not equal 2014).
But there’s one date in particular that was drilled into my head at a very early age… September 13, 1999, the day the Moon was supposedly blasted out of orbit by an immense nuclear explosion and sent hurtling into deep space, carrying with it the hapless inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha, who survived the event they called “Breakaway” only to face the grim prospect of never returning home…
This, of course, is the premise for Space: 1999, a short-lived British-made television series from the early ’70s. I never missed it as a young boy, or at least I tried not to. It aired in this area on Sunday afternoons, when my parents and I were usually at my grandma’s place with the rest of the extended family, and my uncles didn’t appreciate missing an hour of their precious football games so Reg and Alice’s weird son could watch his dippy space show.
The series was — and still is — roundly criticized for scientific inaccuracy and a generally far-fetched premise, and even a fan can’t really defend it against those charges. Still… it made a huge impression upon me. The visual effects were impeccably done, better than anything else on television at the time, and generally still hold up today, and the production design of the show was unique and nicely extrapolated from then-current trends and technology. Also, the show’s moody, almost Gothic tone was quite haunting, especially to an imaginative young boy with certain sensibilities that he would never quite outgrow.
And that’s why, every September 13, I find myself looking up to the Moon and wondering what it would be like if it really did vanish from our skies, and what it would be like for those poor astronauts fifteen years on after such a disaster. I hope they’re getting by…
Incidentally, if you’ve never seen the show and would like to try it out, I found the complete pilot episode online here. Before you mock the white bell-bottomed pantsuits, remember when it was made, and that to people in the ’70s, the future was supposed to look a lot groovier than it’s turned out to be. And if you’re not up for a complete episode, here is a sampler:
As you may recall, I’ve lately been watching the TV series Babylon 5 in its entirety for the first time. It’s not currently available on any of the streaming services I’m familiar with, so I’ve been utilizing the old VHS recordings my lovely Anne made for me when the show ran on the TNT cable network back in the late ’90s… recordings I frankly have never gotten around to viewing before now. I don’t mind relying on these old tapes. They’re available, and the quality of them is good enough for my current purpose, which is merely to see the series. But I have run across a few cock-ups — missing episodes, or hour-long chunks of other programming that was captured instead of B5, so I have to occasionally fast-forward to the next segment of my show. These haven’t been a big deal, as I’ve been able to follow the story well enough… until tonight.
Babylon 5 was one of the first TV series to tell a single, unified story in a serialized format, something we now more or less expect. The first three seasons detail the coming of a massive intergalactic war between two ancient species, the Vorlons and the Shadows, with the “young races” — humans and our various allies and rivals — caught in the middle. Everything has been leading to a final confrontation between the three sides, as well as a resolution to several other plot threads, taking place in a fourth-season episode called “Into the Fire.” I was looking forward to tucking into that one tonight after Anne retired, to finally getting the payoff for all that build-up.
But as it turns out… somehow…. because of some innocent error made nearly 20 years ago… I’ve only got about 10 minutes of that episode. I checked the following tape, just to make sure Anne didn’t realize the last one had run out and thrown a fresh one into her machine midway through the episode. No such luck. That tape starts with the following episode. So no “Into the Fire.” And now I’m left with no idea what happens, except that the war somehow ends. Of all the episodes to miss out on!
I am feeling very… unfulfilled… right about now. Twenty years after the fact.
So, one of the hottest things running right now is the HBO television series Game of Thrones, based on a series of massively popular (and just plain massive) novels by George R.R. Martin. If you don’t know, it’s an epic fantasy set in the imaginary world of Westeros. The focus is on the intrigues of several noble families all jockeying for political power, while, in the background, is the ominous approach of a decades-long winter… and with it, mythical monsters who aren’t so mythical, and aren’t at all friendly. The series is handsomely produced, well written and acted, and it stars a number of actors whose work I really enjoy, notably Sean Bean and the amazingly charismatic Peter Dinklage. Sounds like it ought to be right up my alley, doesn’t it? And yet, in spite of all that, I really don’t care for it much.
Like so much of the dramatic television that everyone has gushed about in recent years — The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, the Battlestar Galactica remake — its tone is just too damn bleak for my tastes. It is, as our colleague Jaquandor has said, a show about awful people doing awful things (or something like that… my apologies if I’m not quoting him accurately), up to and including the murder of a child after he discovers a brother and sister making the beast with two backs. No matter how fine the quality of a TV series, regardless of how many awards it’s won or rave reviews it’s received, I just don’t enjoy the Grim ‘n’ Gritty™ enough to invest a large chunk of my life in it. Yes, Shakespeare wrote about rape, incest, corruption, and murder, too… but Hamlet is only three hours long, whereas Game of Thrones has aired 40 hours’ worth of episodes with two more 10-episode seasons in the works. It’s just too much time spent in the company of people I don’t like and an atmosphere I find revolting.
But it occurs to me that perhaps it isn’t the story being told so much as the idiom in which it is told. In other words, I don’t care for the modern trend toward Grim ‘n’ Gritty™ storytelling… but what if Game of Thrones had been told in a different way… perhaps… the way stories used to be told on television?
Behold the following video clip, which apparently comes from an ancient VHS tape that somehow fell through a wormhole into our world… the opening credits of a Game of Thrones series that was produced in the 1980s of a parallel dimension:
Now that’s a Game of Thrones I could get into!
(Here’s the actualseries opener, just for reference. Thanks to my friend James Cole for finding the “pre-imagined” version.)
When I heard the news a couple weeks ago that Shout! Factory — a niche entertainment company that produces, among other things, DVDs of “orphaned” TV series whose owners abandoned them after releasing only one or two seasons — had licensed my beloved WKRP in Cincinnati, I crossed my fingers and hoped against hope that they were going to do this right.
If you’ll remember, WKRP, which is possibly my all-time favorite television sitcom, is one of those shows that presents a huge challenge for home video, because it used so much actual music performed by original artists. If a scene called for “Old Time Rock and Roll” in the background, WKRP used Bob Seger’s version instead of a re-recorded soundalike. This added immensely to the verisimilitude of a series set in a radio station, but of course all of those songs need to be licensed from the record labels that own the copyrights on them in order to release the show on DVD, or even for syndication. And the cost of doing that adds up in a hurry. Practically from the moment ‘KRP entered syndication in the early ’80s, the music was a problem that the show’s owner “solved” by substituting low-cost generic stuff, or by trimming scenes that featured music. Often this created problems with the narrative because scenes and even entire episodes were written around specific songs, and to not have them there left a big hole… or, in the worst cases, made the story downright incomprehensible.
When Fox released Season One on DVD way back in 2007, the version they released was so heavily edited that many people — myself included — decided it was unacceptable and refused to buy it. Based on poor sales of that first set versus the prohibitive cost of music licensing, Fox decided not to pursue releasing the rest of the series. And so we fans of the show have just had to make due with bootlegs and the butchered syndicated versions for seven long years.
But now along comes Shout! Factory, which has announced plans to do a box set of the entire series. Could it really be that they’ve somehow worked out the licensing issue? Am I finally finally going to get the ‘KRP I remember watching instead of the ghost of itself it has become? Well, Shout! still hasn’t issued a definitive statement… but during a cast reunion at the Paley Center for Media on Wednesday night, Tim Reid — who played disc jockey Venus Flytrap — reportedly said the box set will contain all the original rock music. A little subsequent googling turned up an interview with Hugh Wilson, ‘KRP‘s creator, who claims Shout! has successfully relicensed about 85% of the original music. There’s no release date on the Shout! set yet, so I think it’s probably safe to assume they’re still working on the problem…. which means we may end up with an even higher ratio than 85%.
I can’t tell you how over-the-moon thrilled I am about this. The acquisition of WKRP, along with Time-Life/StarVista’s upcoming release of The Wonder Years — with all its original music intact too! — will basically complete my list of personal holy-grail DVDs, i.e., those movies and TV shows that I’ve wanted to own but thought would never be available in a high-quality digital format. I’ll have it all, except, of course, for sanctioned releases of those pesky pre-1997 versions of the original Star Wars trilogy. And now that Disney is calling the shots on that issue instead of Uncle George, I even have some hope for those…
One of the more pleasant surprises of the TV season just ending has been The Goldbergs, an ABC sitcom predicated on nostalgia for the late, great 1980s. I wasn’t sure about this one at first — the pilot episode was a queasy mismatch of mean-spirited snark and treacly sentiment that had just enough laughs to bring me back for another try. Fortunately, the showrunners saw the problem and modulated the yelling and sarcasm in later episodes, allowing the show to develop its own quirky flavor that’s a lot less Married… with Children and a lot more The Wonder Years.
The Goldbergs actually echoes The Wonder Years — that landmark coming-of-age series that ran in the late ’80s/early ’90s, but was set 20 years earlier — in a number of ways, which I suspect is probably intentional. Like The Wonder Years, the showis built around a family of five familiar archetypes: grumpy dad, kooky mom, moody older sister, bullying lunkhead middle brother, and cute youngest brother, who serves as the protagonist of most stories. The Goldbergs also adds a sixth character to the recipe, a swinging-single grandfather who is winningly played by veteran character actor George Segal.
There are other similarities to The Wonder Years, notably a voice-over narration supplied by an adult version of the youngest brother, as well as the show’s use of original music from the period to comment on and enhance the storylines. (The season ender last week deployed Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” in a way that was simply sublime. If any Gen-Xer watching that episode didn’t end up with a lump in their throat and a big old grin on their lips, they need to catch the first time-traveling DeLorean back to the ’80s and do it all over again.)
However, one big and very remarkable difference between The Goldbergs and The Wonder Years is the way they respectively handle time. While the latter showidentified each season as representing a specific historical year, as well as a specific school year/grade level for its young protagonist, The Goldbergs takes a more… post-modern approach. We are informed in the voice-over each week that the show is set in a generalized “1980-something.” This gimmick — which I think is actually pretty funny — allows the producers to include familiar pop-cultural landmarks, fads, clothing styles, and news events from all over the decade without smart-alecks like me pointing out, for example, that there were five years between the release of The Goonies and the advent of the Reebok Pump basketball shoe, two ’80s icons that have both figured prominently in recent episodes. This approach gives the show a slightly absurdist tone, but in a weird way, it helps to better capture the sense of the Awesome ’80 than a show with a more persnickety focus on detail might. We end up with something that feels true rather than strictly factual. Kind of like the jumbled, middle-aged, increasingly unreliable memories of the Gen-Xers who surely comprise the show’s target demographic.
(It also occurs to me that perhaps this “1980-something” trope says something about how we Xers recall our youth versus how the Baby Boomers who made The Wonder Years saw theirs. They were all about earnestness and bittersweet poignancy, whereas — if a sitcom can be said to be representative of a generation — we’re a lot more irreverent about our formative decade. That’s not to say The Goldbergs is never poignant — I frequently get a little something in my eye while watching — but it lacks the self-consciousness and self-importance of its predecessor. To follow this through to the grossest overgeneralization I’ll ever make based on a half-hour sitcom, the Boomers wanted to change the world; we Xers just wanted to have fun with it.)
The Goldbergs‘ theme song — if a composition only 30 seconds long can really be called a song — has a similar post-modern, mix-and-match origin. Performed by a band called I Fight Dragons, “Rewind” is a mixture of pop instruments and vocals with something called “chiptune,” electronic music and other sounds originally synthesized by vintage computers and video games. The result, like the show itself, is weirdly effective at evoking the feel of the ’80s without really being much like an actual TV theme from the era. I’ll warn you now before you click “Play”: it’s insanely catchy.
I love it.
I recently tweeted I Fight Dragons to ask if there’s a longer version of this, and they actually responded… it won’t be on their upcoming album, but they will “definitely be doing a full-length version soon.” Something to watch for…
I was aware of the television series Babylon 5 during its initial run back in the mid-1990s, but I wasn’t a regular viewer. The show was syndicated, you see, and as I recall, it aired around these parts in an inconvenient time slot… Saturday or Sunday afternoons, I think, when I was usually out of the house. Something like that. Anyway, I caught episodes here and there, enough to get some idea of the characters and the overall arc of the story. And of course I read and heard a lot about the show, especially the controversial charges that executives at Paramount had plagiarized key ideas from B5 when they developed Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. But I never saw the series in its entirety, not even in the later ’90s after the show moved to the TNT cable network for its final season and my lovely Anne recorded the whole damn thing for me. The stack of 20 or so VHS tapes that resulted from her efforts ended up in a box in my basement, waiting until I could find the time to watch them…
Well, I have no idea what inspires these things, but a couple weeks ago, I decided it was finally time to pull those tapes out of their long sleep and check out Babylon 5 from start to finish. (Yes, I still have a working VCR… after all, I am “an analog kind of guy!”) I’m now about midway through season two — the show ran for five years, plus a number of TV movies and a short-lived spinoff series — and so far, I’m enjoying it.
B5 isn’t a perfect series, by any stretch of the imagination. It suffers from many of the flaws common to syndicated television of its era: a low budget that translates into visibly flimsy sets, occasionally clunky storytelling, and performances that range from “good” to “adequate” to “what’d they do, recruit the craft-services guy for this scene?” Also, even though I’m not usually one to carp about the visual effects in older media, I have to say the computer-generated imagery in this series is sometimes pretty dodgy, even by the standards of the time. (In addition to pioneering the serialized “novel for television” style of storytelling we take for granted these days, B5 was also the first television series to make extensive use of CGI. Sadly, it was still a young art at the time, and again, the show’s low budget had an impact on its final look.)
In spite of these problems, though, there is something weirdly compelling about the show, and I think I understand why it has such a loyal cult following. I believe it’s because of the ideas at work in the series, more than the execution of those ideas. As much as I love Star Trek — and all my Loyal Readers ought to know how much that is —I think it can be argued that B5 is, in certain respects, a more realistic vision of the future. The crew of the Babylon station faces budgetary problems, overbearing (and distant) bureaucracy, labor disputes, an onboard population of homeless indigents, struggles with addiction and family and faith, mundane complaints like making the rent… all recognizable elements of the modern human experience that the crew of the Enterprise would merely dismiss with the breezy explanation that, “we outgrew that sort of thing long ago.” Star Trek’s optimism about humanity solving our social ills is, of course, a big part of its appeal, but it became far overplayed in the spin-offs, at least in my opinion. (The original series of the 1960s was a bit more grounded than The Next Generation and later Treks… again, in my opinion.) And while Star Trek posits a utopian future society in which religion has essentially ceased to matter (if not actually to exist), the Earth of B5’s 23rd century is as messily — and recognizably — diverse as our own. In one memorable early episode, the various alien ambassadors, whose species all have a uniform faith, are introduced to all the myriad belief systems of humanity. I found that moment unexpectedly moving, because it felt right.
Another thing about B5 that I especially appreciate is its acknowledgement of 20th century popular culture. On Star Trek, if the entertainments of our era were mentioned at all, it was accompanied by a disdainful sniff. Everyone in that future was into Shakespeare and Mozart, but it was if our culture — the present-day culture that produced Star Trek, after all — didn’t survive and didn’t count. Not so with B5, where one major character has a poster of Daffy Duck in his quarters. That seems to me a far more likely scenario, especially these days, when the Internet has demonstrated that nothing ever really goes away. Or at least, it never will again.
Consider the following scene, in which a news reporter asks the station’s commander, following a particularly harrowing incident aboard the station, if being out in space is really worth the effort. While I’ve always loved Captain Kirk’s answer to the same question — a high-minded ode to the spirit of exploration — Commander Sinclair’s answer is a bit more… prosaic:
This is a familiar argument for space buffs, that human beings must expand outward into the universe to assure our species’ long-term survival, but I love that he uses Marilyn Monroe and Buddy Holly as examples of the human experience that are worth saving… examples equal in stature to the great writers, philosophers, and scientists he also names. I love it because I believe it’s true. Why wouldn’t — why shouldn’t — our pop-cultural icons survive along with Shakespeare and Mozart? B5 appeals to my tastes by… well, appealing to my tastes. It is, as the kids say, relevant to my interests.
Don’t misunderstand… I’m a lifelong Trekkie and nothing is ever going to undo that. And I still have quite a bit of Babylon 5 to go; it’s entirely possible that I may really despise wherever the series ends up going. But so far, I’m finding it a refreshing alternative vision…
(Sorry, incidentally, for the quality of that clip… it was the only one I could find.)
It’s been a loooooong time since I posted a TV Title Sequence. Here’s a cool one:
Mmmmm, young Marg Helgenberger… And Robert Picardo with hair! How weird is that?
I can’t recall if I ever actually watched China Beach, or if I was just aware of it through the Vietnam-obsessed zeitgeist of late ’80s television. Even so, I’m tempted to go ahead and spend the $200 Time Life wants for its exclusive release of this series, just to support the effort TL made to license all the original period music used in the show. Yes, that’s a lot of money for a four-season show that only totals 65 episodes, considering most TV series can be had for around $20 or $30 bucks a season these days. And it’s especially spendy for what amounts to a blind buy for me, since I don’t really remember the series. But there’s a principle at stake here that I firmly believe: TV shows that integrated “real” music into their storylines ought to be released intact, as they originally aired, or there’s no point in releasing them at all. Universal did it the right way with Miami Vice; the season sets of that one were a bit more money than other DVD sets, at least when they were first released (you can pick them up cheap now), but true Vice fans were willing to pay a premium to have the show done properly. Fox, on the other hand, dropped the ball badly on its first and only WKRP in Cincinnati release, when the set came out at an economical price point but practically every song had been replaced by generic music, or cut altogether. Even scenes when the characters themselves were singing got cut out. ‘KRP fans rightfully rejected this stillborn disaster, and Fox has declined to do anything else with the property, alas.
Getting back to China Beach, I like to commend Time Life for taking the trouble to pursue the licenses, and the gamble that fans will be willing to pay for. Now, is there anything you can do about The Wonder Years and/or acquiring the aforementioned WKRP from Fox for a second try?
When I opened my browser this morning, this was the first item in my news feed:
Doctor Who Helped Find Bin Laden Given Jail Term, Official Says
Is it just me, or did you also interpret the first two words as a proper noun on the first read through? In other words, did you at first think the headline meant the U.S. government had some assistance in its search for Bin Laden from this guy:
Well, why the hell not? He’s always mucking about in British government stuff, so why not U.S. affairs as well? The Doctor somehow involved in the search for bin Laden… who of course must have been more than he seemed to attract the attention of a Time Lord… Sounds like a good start for some fanfic… if I were into that sort of thing…
