The next couple of entries probably aren’t going to be of any interest to anyone except me — and isn’t it cute that I think any of my entries are of interest to anyone except myself? — but these are housekeeping-type things that I feel obligated to do in order to satisfy my own OCD-fueled mania for lists and historical accounting, and I need to do them pretty damn quick, too, since the first month of 2011 is already gone. Anyhow, if for some reason you are interested in reading on, here’s everything on which I wasted my meager leisure time during the previous year…
You may recall me mentioning a while back that the classic sci-fi TV series Doctor Who was filming an episode right in my own backyard, specifically Utah’s Monument Valley. Well, now you can catch a glimpse of the result in the official trailer for Series 6. (In case you don’t know, the Brits call a television season a “series,” and what we think of as a series is a “program” — well, technically, a “programme” — and yes, I realize this trailer won’t make a lot of sense to people who aren’t familiar with the show. To be honest, I haven’t seen enough of the most recent season/series to consider myself “familiar” either, but hey, it’s Doctor Who, and it’s Utah, so I get that much at least…)
When I was a teenager watching the super-low-budget ’70s-vintage Doctor Who in my bedroom late at night, I never could’ve imagined the show coming to America. Back then, every alien world or historical time period the Doctor visited looked suspiciously like a rock quarry just outside of London, a windswept heath right out of Thomas Hardy, or a really cheap plywood set. To be honest, that was part of the show’s appeal for me, because it was so different from what I was used to, and everything looked so… British.
The show is different since its 2005 relaunch, with more variety in its real-world locations and CGI enabling the producers to create (mostly) realistic and truly unearthly virtual places, but there’s still something constrained, for lack of a better word, about the show’s overall look. I think it’s the difference between the cozy, worn-in landscape of the U.K., and the rugged, wide-open spaces I’m familiar with out here in the western U.S. Which means I’m itching with curiosity to see what such a quintessentially British series is going to make of such an iconic American landscape. I hope it’s more than just that wonderful helicopter shot we see in the trailer, that the producers really took advantage of being here. I suspect they did, what with all the talk about “somewhere different, somewhere… brand new.”
Incidentally, although this marks the first time Doctor Who has filmed in America, I know of at least one other episode that was set here, and once again, the action took place in the deserts of Utah. Well, in tunnels that were supposedly beneath those deserts, but still, close enough. Salt Lake City was explicitly referenced, in any event. It makes me wonder who on the Who staff has the fascination for my home state….
Hm. You know, the modern incarnation of Doctor Who is produced by BBC Wales. It occurs to me that my own ancestors were Mormon converts who originated from Wales. Now isn’t that an interesting coincidence? Is it possible the producers feel some inexplicable pull toward this dry, desolate land so far from their own green hills, like something in their blood? Sounds like a Doctor Who storyline right there…
I think most of my Loyal Readers are probably familiar with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — that sublimely silly sci-fi spoof by Douglas Adams — in one or another of its many varied forms. (It has been a radio show, a low-budget BBC television series, a big-budget Hollywood feature film, and, of course, a bestselling novel.) But I’d be very surprised if many of you know Adams’ other major literary works, a novel called Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and its sequel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. I’ll be honest… I don’t remember them all that well myself. In fact, I’m not certain I ever got around to reading Tea-Time, and the only thing that has stayed with me about the first one is a joke at the expense of my hometown… something about an electric monk who has recently started malfunctioning and is therefore believing in things they’d have a hard time accepting in Salt Lake City.
Well, I thought that was terribly witty when I was in my teens.
Anyhow, somebody remembers the Dirk Gently books, because I’ve just learned via Boing Boing that the BBC has done a TV adaptation of them. Here’s a brief and not-terribly-informative trailer for it:
Might be something worth seeking out. If you like this sort of thing. Which I do. No word on when or if it’s coming to American TV, though…
Starting off the week with a dim, gray, and rainy Monday. I think we need a happy video to liven things up, don’t you?
Today’s selection will probably not make a lot of sense to some of my Loyal Readers, but for all you folks who are about to be baffled, trust me: this is very cool and funny. This is what’s known in the TV business as a “cold open,” a brief segment of a show that precedes the opening credits. This is actually a pretty common device, especially among hour-long dramas and talk shows. CSI, for example, always does a cold open consisting of the discovery of the dead body of the week, followed by the bad pun of the week, and then a smash cut to The Who singing the theme song.
In this case, we’re looking at a cold open from a recent episode of The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson — the best late-night talk show currently running, in my humble opinion; Leno, Letterman, and Conan, meh — for which a friend of mine was lucky enough to be in the live studio audience. Which means I heard about this opening a couple weeks in advance. For some reason, though, the bit was cut when the show actually aired. (I’m guessing some network suit thought it was too obscure and viewers wouldn’t get it, but I don’t actually know.) But the 21st Century being what it is, the clip naturally leaked onto the InterWebs last week, and now here it is for everyone’s pleasure and edification:
Ferguson is riffing on Doctor Who, of course, the classic British science-fiction series that ran from 1963 to 1989 and was recently revived (in a somewhat more grown-up version) to much acclaim. While it’s all presented in a very silly fashion, Ferguson pretty handily summarizes all the major ideas of the show here. And in case you’re wondering, the nervous-looking young man who shows up right at the end of the routine is Matt Smith, the latest (and youngest) actor to play the iconic character.
Speaking of Matt Smith, I’ve been meaning to mention that he and the rest of the Who cast have recently been right here in my humble little home state of Utah, filming an episode of the show in Monument Valley, that starkly beautiful landscape made famous in countless Westerns and TV commercials. This marks the first time Doctor Who has filmed in the United States, and even though I’m more of a casual fan than truly rabid about this show, I am absolutely delighted that they came here, to my own backyard, in order to mark the occasion. I have no idea if Monument Valley will be standing in for some alien planet — remember, Pixar’s Princess of Mars project has been shooting in the same general area — or if it will be properly identified for what it is. Considering the Doctor is a time-traveler, I have a hunch it’ll probably be an Old West setting in the classic Hollywood style (paging John Ford!). But nevertheless, it’ll be fun to see a piece of home on a show that is so uniquely British.
So, it seems that Doritos and Pepsi Max are co-sponsoring this contest called Crash the Super Bowl, which invites all you clever video and film people out there to make a commercial and submit it to a website for judging. The makers of the top five videos for each product (ten total) will receive cash prizes, and then the top three videos for each brand (six in all) will air during the Super Bowl, whereupon the lucky winning filmmakers will be granted outlandish fame, vast fortunes, irresistible sex appeal, and a puppy.
Okay, not really, but the filmmakers will have the thrill and professional exposure of having their work appear during the biggest televised sporting event of the year. My friend and occasional co-conspirator Mike Chenoweth is hoping to get a piece of that action with a clever commercial that combines pitches for both products in a single concept that required, as he puts it, “15 Family-sized Doritos bags, 60 Pepsi Max cans and an amazing cast / crew!!!!”
His video is now up on the Crash the Super Bowl website. I can’t embed it here, unfortunately, but you can have a look at it by clicking this. If you’re amused, please consider voting for him, if for no other reason than so I can bask in his reflected glory…
Remember a year or so back when I was so amused that the writers of the TV series Castle had inserted a metajoke about Firefly, the series that Castle lead Nathan Fillion had previously starred in? Well, they’ve done it again.
I don’t have anything substantive to say about that big Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert thing that happened in Washington over the weekend. As I’ve noted before, I’m not a big fan of irony, and I’m also not comfortable with the way Stewart and Colbert blur the already-fuzzy line between entertainment and real journalism. And when you’ve got the organizer of the thing, Stewart himself, saying that he only wanted people to show up (as quoted in the article I linked), well, the whole thing seems kind of pointless, doesn’t it? Yes, yes, it was very cute and clever of all those people to create absurd protest signs that mock the messages and grammar of the tea-party signs, but was anything really accomplished? I don’t know… I didn’t attend and I didn’t watch it on TV, so maybe I’m missing the point. It wouldn’t be the first time.
All my grumbling aside, however, I couldn’t resist passing along one particular image from the rally. If you’ve been hanging around this blog for any length of time, I think you’ll be able to figure out why:
Nice to see my personal constituency so well-represented at the rally, even if this guy did conflate the Cylons of my beloved classic Battlestar with the slang terminology (“toasters”) of the remake. Ah well. It’s the thought that counts.
Here’s a pretty good runner-up, also from the geek category:
You can see more of this sort of thing here, if you’ve a mind to. Giving credit where it’s due, the Cylon photo is courtesy of Flickr user Caobhin; Xena comes from Flickr user Kyle Rush.
I’m not a sports guy, so I’m only dimly aware of who LeBron James even is. And I think Nike’s advertising has become increasingly pretentious and unappealing over the last decade or so. Which means this TV spot is nearly insufferable to me, clocking in at a patience-straining minute-and-a-half in length, nearly all of it consisting of James asking variations of the rhetorical headscratcher, “What should I do?” (I know he recently ditched his old team for a new one in what I gather was a very uncool fashion that made a lot of people very unhappy, so the ad actually comes across — in my eyes, at least — as a childish “screw you” to his former fans, which doesn’t seem like an effective way to sell overpriced sneakers. But as I said, I’m not a sports guy, I really don’t understand LeBron’s situation, and I’m not the target demo for this ad, so what the hell do I know?)
However, there are ten seconds in this drawn-out pile of hokum that are actually really cool, from about 0:56 to 1:06. Take a look:
It always brings a smile to my face to see one of my old fictional friends, and I thought this little cameo was exceptionally well done, recapturing exactly the right tone and world-weary nobility in only a few quick brush strokes. Of course, music helps immeasurably. For the record, that is the authentic, original series music playing in the background. Just in case y’all aren’t enough of a fan to know…
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not much for anime, those Japanese-made animated films that typically feature characters with enormous eyes (or hardly any eyes at all), bizarrely stylized facial expressions, and utterly insane hair-dos. I’ve sampled several of the acknowledged classics of the form over the years, but despite my genuine interest in Japan and its culture, I’ve just never been able to warm up to this stuff. In general, anyhow. There are two notable exceptions, a pair of anime for which I do have genuine affection, both of them television series that showed up in America right around the time I was absolutely crazy for anything that included spaceships and rayguns (i.e., the fifth grade).
The first was a show I think most people in my general age demo will remember, Battle of the Planets, which followed a team of five teenage superheroes known as G-Force.
Just lately, I’ve been working my way through Season One of the old TV series Vega$ on DVD. If you don’t remember it, Vega$ — not to be confused with the more recent James Caan series Las Vegas — was an early entry in the private-detective genre that dominated prime time during much of the 1980s, running for three seasons from 1978 to ’81. The show was created by Michael Mann, who would later become the driving force behind Miami Vice, and his pilot script suggested Vega$ could have been a stylish series with enough grit to allow some serious storytelling and character development, but without getting too heavy. Unfortunately, Mann’s influence was quickly swamped by executive producer Aaron Spelling’s trademark glitz, superficiality, and penchant for the ridiculous. For example, a typical episode from the first season involved an unscrupulous land developer trying to scare a retired madame off her property by — get this — sending a gorilla to threaten her. Or more precisely, a guy in a ratty-looking gorilla suit, like the ones Hawkeye and Trapper wore when they wanted to annoy Frank Burns. Yeah, it’s a pretty bad show, even by the admittedly looser standards of the time.
(In case you’re wondering, I was never a fan, not even back in the day; in fact, I don’t recall ever watching it at all. The only reason it even pinged my radar is because the lead character drove a red 1957 Ford Thunderbird like my dad’s. I picked up the DVDs out of curiosity, and to get a look at that car, and now I’m watching with the same sick “I cannot look away” fascination I feel when I see some white-trash loser getting busted for huffing paint on COPS.)
Believe it or not, though, my purpose here really isn’t to rip on Vega$ for simply being what it was, namely a product of the Spelling cheese factory. After all, it ran in the time slot following Charlie’s Angels, so what else could it have been but a big old pile of Kraft singles? No, what I’m interested in discussing is how eerily similar Vega$ was to another detective series, a much more respected and beloved series, a series that was starting production right around the time Vega$ was winding down: Magnum, PI. The two shows are so similar, in fact, that I think you can make a pretty good argument that Magnum, better though it might have been, was something of a Vega$ rip-off. Consider the following:
