The Glass Teat

Aug082010

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…

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…)

May212010

Just to Demonstrate the Unfathomable Depths of My Geekiness

I took a walk earlier, from my office over to my credit union, and along the way, I happened to spot a handbill pasted to a lamppost. It was typical for this sort of thing: a homemade, Xerox’d advertisement for a band I’ve never heard of, scheduled to play at a club I’d never set foot in, the sort of ad I see a dozen times a week and never pay any mind to. This one, however, caught my attention because I recognized the photo the band had used, no doubt with a great deal of irony and private amusement on their part. It was, in fact, this photo here:

A publicity still of Peter Barton in The Powers of Matthew Star

This is a publicity still from a short-lived TV series called The Powers of Matthew Star, circa 1982 or thereabouts, about an alien prince from a besieged world, hiding out here on Earth in the guise of a typical teenage boy. Who just happens to have telekinetic superpowers with which he helps out the people around him, of course. I suspect that 99.99999% of the rest of the world has completely forgotten this show, if in fact anyone ever knew about it to begin with. Probably Louis Gossett, Jr., doesn’t even remember this show, and he was in the damn thing. But I remember it. Because I’m me.
This is my gift. And my curse.

Incidentally, I ganked that image up there from this site, a pretty nifty project in which somebody is scanning and commenting on old issues of Starlog magazine. I always loved Starlog, the best source of sci-fi and fantasy news for decades before this whole InterWeb thing came along. I still have quite a few back issues down in the archives. Including the one with the article about The Powers of Matthew Star.

It’s okay, I’m frightened, too…

May172010

Really? Twenty Years? Naaah…

SamuraiFrog reminds us that yesterday, May 16, was the 20th anniversary of Muppet-master Jim Henson’s sad and far-too-early death. Twenty years since that spooky day when my entire university campus seemed to fall into a deep depression. Few individuals have that kind of effect on an entire generation. And the thing I admire so much about Jim is that he did it with nothing more than whimsy and sly humor, and the imagination to turn feathers and foam and random bits of stuff into characters that still seem to live and breathe in our collective consciousness.

Still… twenty years? I’m really having a hard time wrapping my mind around that one!

Incidentally, the photo above is one I ran across quite a while ago; I’ve been waiting for a good reason to post it, and this seems as good a time as any. I’m sorry to say I don’t know who the man on Jim’s left is; the gentleman to his right is, of course, Frank Oz, Jim’s friend and co-conspirator during what I would call the “golden age” of The Muppets: the pre-Elmo Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, and The Muppet Movie. It seems to me that Frank, like Dan Ackroyd after Belushi, lost some minuscule but crucial animating spark after Jim’s death. Perhaps that’s presumptuous of me, considering I don’t know the man, but that is nevertheless the sense I get when he talks about the old days.

I think a lot of us feel that way, actually…

Feb272010

Live and Direct from Network 23

Edison Carter and Theora Jones in the short-lived series Max Headroom

Astounding! Earlier in the week, I reported the DVD release date for the 1982-83 TV series Tales of the Gold Monkey; now this morning I read the even more unlikely news that Max Headroom is on its way as well!

Although I’m sure most children of the ’80s will remember Max from the Coke and New Coke commercials of the day, the series Max Headroom had nothing to do with those, aside from the character of Max himself. Based on a British made-for-TV movie called Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future, the American-made series followed the adventures of Edison Carter, an investigative journalist living in a near-future dystopia entirely dominated by massive corporations and television. When Carter gets a little too close to uncovering his employers’ nasty secret, they attempt to download his brain and create a virtual replica of their top-rated news personality so they can eliminate the troublesome original. The experiment doesn’t quite succeed, and a smart-mouthed AI named Max Headroom is born!

Max Headroom was a trippy show, a biting satire of consumerism and mass media wrapped up in a tissue of futuristic ideas that wouldn’t penetrate the consciousness of mainstream audiences for another 10 or 15 years. (I’m not ashamed to admit that I didn’t fully comprehend some aspects of it myself.) Weirdly prescient in a lot of ways, and just plain weird in a lot of others, the show failed to find much of an audience, and it lasted less than a single season. Nevertheless, it made an impact on those who liked it; I don’t think it’s a stretch to call it a minor landmark in the history of science fiction, and certainly in the pop culture of the 1980s. I can’t begin to imagine how well it holds up today, but I’m excited to add it to my collection.

The press release doesn’t mention anything about possible extra features on the DVDs — I’d love to have those old Coke ads at least, and ideally the complete 20 Minutes into the Future movie — but the way these things go, I’ll count myself lucky just to have the series itself.

The release date for this set is August 10. I ought to be finished with Gold Monkey by then, so that will be just about perfect…

Update: I’ve just remembered that I already wrote about Max Headroom a couple years ago, when I posted the show’s opening credits as part of my TV Title Sequences series. It appears that the embedded video in that previous entry has been removed by the copyright Nazis; for your viewing pleasure, here is another version:

Feb232010

I’m Going to Bora-Gora This Summer!

I’ve just learned that Tales of the Gold Monkey, one of the “holy grails” of my misspent youth, will get its official DVD release on June 8. You can read the details here, if you’ve a mind to.

It looks like it’s going to be a nicely done set, with a 36-minute retrospective documentary (rare for these old television shows), a number of photo galleries and episode commentaries, and a collectible booklet. That’s impressive treatment for a series that lasted only one season way back in 1982! And I even like the package art, which is usually a big weak spot for TV-show DVDs. Although I do have to admit that the Gold Monkey artwork looks a lot like what was done for the Young Indiana Jones series; I guess Gold Monkey never will manage to shake off that particular association, will it?

In any event, this makes me irrationally happy… the last week or so has been pretty crappy, for reasons that will be revealed shortly, and this little jolt of good news is welcome distraction indeed.

Oh, and if you have no idea what the hell I’m even talking about, I’ve previously written about Tales of the Gold Monkey here and here.

Feb182010

Missing Jim

Kermit the Frog remembers an old friend

Not much to say, I just really liked this photo I spotted over at SamuraiFrog’s place.

It amazes me how alive The Muppets, and especially Kermit, still seem to me, even after all these years, and even when I’m looking at a picture that ought to shatter any remaining illusion that these things are anything but a cloth tube — a decorated sock, really — with a human being’s hand up the bottom. And yet, looking at this all-too-recognizable pose, this reminder that a gentle man and an insanely creative artist left us way before his time, brings a lump to my throat because, for just a moment, I know exactly what that silly cloth frog is “feeling.”

I miss him, too, Kermie… we all do.

Jan202010

American Idol Is Back!

And this is pretty much how I feel about that:

see more Lol Celebs

Dec252009

Christmas Eve Cartoon: Bedtime for Sniffles

When I was a kid, the Salt Lake television market boasted a number of locally made shows for children. For the toddler set, there was Romper Room with Miss Julie on KSL. When I was older, I enjoyed the old Flash Gordon serials and nautical-themed silliness on KSTU’s Lighthouse 20. And when I was in grade school, my favorite part of weekday mornings was Hotel Balderdash on KTVX, channel 4.

Hotel Balderdash was primarily a forum for running old cartoons, but there were also live-action framing segments that were set in the titular hotel and featured a pair of Laurel-and-Hardy-type characters named Harvey and Cannonball. Guess which one was the fat guy?

Anyhow, as I said, the big draw for Balderdash was the cartoons, which were mostly Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies with the occasional Popeye thrown in for good measure. But these weren’t the same Looney Tunes you saw on the Saturday morning Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show. These were whatever cartoons a small-time station located in a little backwater state called Utah could afford, which meant the old stuff. The really old stuff. A lot of stuff involving characters without names and caricatures of Hollywood stars who’d been dead for 20 years before I ever saw them. Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck turned up from time to time, but they were the early, off-model versions, the ones where Bugs had short ears and acted, well, looney instead his more familiar cocky self. I never liked those much, but at least they were better than the cartoons starring Sniffles the Mouse.

Sniffles was one of Chuck Jones’ early attempts at creating an animated star for Warner Bros. With his oversized head, girly-sounding voice, and sappy-sweet manner, he was far too cutesy for my tastes, even when I was a kid. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who felt that way, since Sniffles appeared in only 12 cartoons between 1939 and 1946 before he dropped into obscurity. And Hotel Balderdash ran them all. Frequently. I remember my heart shrinking a little bit inside every time one of them came on. They were things to be endured until Popeye or proto-Bugs came along to restore my spirits. All of them, that is, except Bedtime for Sniffles, the one where Sniffles tries his damnedest to stay awake on Christmas Eve so he can see Santa Claus. For some reason, I liked that one, especially when it actually ran near Christmastime (it wasn’t unusual to see this one in July; Balderdash ran what they had available, regardless of whether it was season-appropriate). I think I enjoyed the gags involving the human-sized “furnishings” of Sniffles’ home, and the music, and the general tone of the piece. I think. I honestly can’t say now, roughly 35 years later, what the appeal was.

I found myself thinking of this cartoon as I drove home about an hour ago, through streets that were eerily barren of life. I was surprised to find it in its entirety on YouTube. And here it is, for anyone who may be dumb enough to be sitting up in the wee hours of Christmas morning, like I am:

To any of my Loyal Readers who may be out there, Merry Christmas. Let’s get to bed, shall we?

Dec232009

Child of (Too Much) TV Meme

The last few entries have been a little on the grim and/or grouchy side, so why don’t we try a nice, pleasant meme? The meme fad seems to be in decline these days, but SamuraiFrog somehow continues to stumble across them; here’s one I spotted over at his place a few days ago, which he called the “Child of (Too Much) TV meme.”
It’s a long list of TV-show titles, to which you are supposed to do the following:

Rules:
– Bold all of the following TV shows of which you’ve ever seen 3 or more episodes in your lifetime.
– Italicize a show if you’re positive you’ve seen every episode of it.

Me being me, I shall of course add the occasional comment as we go along. Shall we begin?