The Glass Teat

Apr262008

Saturday Mornings Back in the Day

Saturday Morning Live Action Televison by Dusty Abell

Via Chris Roberson, here’s an awesome piece of art by a guy named Dusty Abell that probably won’t mean a damn thing to any of the younger folks out there in InternetLand, but ought to bring a smile to the faces of all us aging thirtysomethings.
In case you’ve forgotten (or never knew them), these are the heroes and villains of all those great live-action TV adventures that used to alternate with cartoons on Saturday mornings back in the ’70s. Children’s television back then was blissfully un-self-conscious, utterly lacking in the cynical sense of irony, marketing potential, and self-aware references to other pop culture that infest today’s kidvid stuff. It was also incredibly low-budget, heartbreakingly earnest, and broadly (i.e., poorly) acted. But it was wonderful stuff anyhow. Mostly fantasy or science fiction in nature, it stretched the imaginations of many a wide-eyed young viewer, and I didn’t realize how much I missed these shows until just now. I feel sorry for modern-day kids; Saturday mornings these days just suck.

Click on the image to blow it up large and see how many of these characters you can name. The complete roster is below the fold…

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Apr082008

Deal or No Deal? How About If I Throw in a Bevy of Slave Leias?

Chewie and R2 were reduced to doing the game-show circuit after their manager embezzled all the royalties...

Oh, boy… what a conundrum…

You see, I loathe the “competitive reality show” phenomenon that has overtaken primetime television in recent years. Survivor and its highly contrived ilk long ago wore out their welcome for me and the American Idol-style talent shows alternately bore and irritate me. However, I reserve a particularly strong flame of hatred for the mind-numbingly stupid modern-day variants of the traditional quiz-show format. I think it’s the way they all try to generate artificial suspense by having the contestants deliberate for ridiculously long periods of time (usually not very believably — I mean, come on, how hard is it to answer the lowest difficulty level of these softball questions? Is the sky is blue or green? You honestly don’t know that one? Well, then just pick one!) while ominous “the clock is ticking and which wire is Jack Bauer going to clip” music plays in the background. This technique was developed for Regis Philbin’s thankfully deceased Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, but it endures in the even-more-annoying Deal or No Deal, in which contestants essentially play three-card monte by choosing from a range of metal attache cases in hopes that one of them will contain a cool million bucks. (The difference, of course, is that the contestants aren’t betting their own money and so have nothing, really, to lose by just picking one, a scenario that makes the delayed-response thing even more obnoxious. It’s not like Howie Mandel is pulling cash out of their wallets for every wrong choice they make!)

Needless to say, I don’t watch Deal if I can possibly avoid it — which is sometimes tricky, because my parents love the damn thing, so I have to be careful about when I choose to visit them — but now an item on the Official Star Wars blog has piqued my curiosity… not to mention my prurient interests.

If you’ve never seen the show, part of Deal‘s schtick is that the attache cases that may or may not contain the million-dollar winnings (well, the cases actually contain cards with a dollar amount written on them) are held by 26 lovely female models, all wearing identical dresses (I believe they’re usually red). But according to the Star Wars blog, an upcoming episode will have the Deal models dressed in the classic Princess Leia slave-girl outfit from Return of the Jedi, a.k.a., the “metal bikini.” Can any loyal fanboy whose puberty was haunted by sail-barge fantasies resist that diabolical kind of lure? Especially when Vader, Chewie, R2-D2, and Carrie Fisher herself are also supposed to be on hand? I guess we’ll find out…

(As an aside, I will admit that the idea of a Star Wars-themed episode did make me smile, even if I dislike the show, because it brings back a lot of fond memories of How Things Used to Be. Back in the late ’70s, every variety show on the air, from The Muppet Show to Donny and Marie did an SW episode. It seems like strange timing to do one now, though; I’ve been thinking lately that SW in general, and the original trilogy in particular, is fading from the pop-cultural radar now that the prequels are complete. Perhaps Deal or No Deal skews heavily among people in my demographic?)

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Apr042008

Don’t Eat the Snow in Hawaii

To my knowledge, I’ve never really had a genuine, honest-to-gosh nemesis, but I’m beginning to think it just might be Matthew McConaughey. Yes, that Matthew McConaughey, the naked-bongo-playing goodtime-funboy with the perfect six-pack abs and the spotty box-office record.

And why, you may ask, would I elevate this inoffensively goofy would-be movie star to the level of “nemesis”? Well, first, he brought his special kind of blandness to Dirk Pitt, the literary swashbuckler whose adventures I devoured as a youth. Now, according to ScreenRant.com, he may be in line to transform another of my puberty-era heroes into one of his signature sleepy-eyed slacker doofuses (doofi?): Thomas Magnum, a.k.a. Magnum, P.I., the Ferrari-driving, Hawaii-based TV detective played in the 1980s by Tom Selleck.

Sigh.

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Apr012008

TV Title Sequences: Highlander: The Series

In an effort to cleanse my eyes of the filthy residue left over from Highlander: The Suck, er, The Source, I’ve begun re-watching my DVDs of Highlander: The Series. And considering that I haven’t done a TV Title Sequence entry in a while, well, you can probably guess where I’m going with this one…

It’s not uncommon for title sequences to evolve as the show goes along: the theme music changes, background visuals get updated with more recent footage, cast members come and go. But I can’t think of any other series that had as many distinct variants of their openings as Highlander. There were at least four major ones, and probably several minor ones as well if you obsessively cataloged every little tweak that was made over the show’s six-season run. The problem was the same one I always run into whenever I try to write or talk about the show, which is the need to somehow convey a lot of pretty far-out backstory for first-time viewers who don’t know a Quickening from a Kwik-E-Mart. The premise and formula of Highlander isn’t really that complicated once you’ve watched a couple of episodes, but I still remember how baffling it was to be thrown into the first movie with no prior knowledge of what the hell was going on, and the showrunners were surely aware of that newbie reaction.

Here’s their first attempt to spell it all out:

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Mar242008

A Shat Sampler

For my own tribute to The Greatest Thespian of Our Time — and I’m only being somewhat facetious here, because I honestly do think William Shatner is much better than most people give him credit for, at least when he’s really trying and not just collecting a paycheck — I’d like to present some of his finest moments in front of the camera.

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Mar212008

The Original Futurama Theme

Ah, the awful work day is over. Let’s talk about something a bit more uplifting, shall we? How about television?

The late, lamented Futurama has always been something of a conundrum for me. It’s a show I really wanted to like: an animated science fiction/comedy series created by the guy who brought us The Simpsons, a spoof of and loving homage to all the futuristicky space crap I’ve always loved, a niche thing that appeals only to a particular elite (read: cult) who actually recognize all the subtle nods to the big SF films and TV of the last 40 years. Oh, and it features the voice talents of the lovely Katey Sagal, a.k.a. Peggy Bundy from Married with Children, one of my guilty pleasures for years. How could I not love Futurama?

I don’t know, but somehow I don’t. The overall design of the show — the look of the environment, the Galaxy Express spaceship, the characters — amuses me, and I occasionally snicker at the sociopathic robot Bender or the frankly bizarre Dr. Zoidberg, but I don’t very often laugh deeply, not the way I do at The Simpsons or some other sitcoms. Hell, I find Two and a Half Men a lot funnier than Futurama. (I don’t know if that says more about Futurama or me, though, and I don’t know that it’s something I ought to be admitting, either…).

I do, however, love Futurama‘s opening credits. Like the title sequence for The Simpsons, this sequence is a tour of the world in which the show takes place, set to a catchy, somewhat goofy theme song. Also like The Simpsons, the opening credits for Futurama feature a gag that changes every episode, in this case the text under the main title itself. Here’s a typical example:

***VIDEO MISSING***

But’s here’s an interesting bit of trivia for you: that theme song is apparently based on a much older piece of music. Naturally, somebody out there on the InterWebs has tracked down that piece of music and made it available to the entire world… click through for more!

According to this guy, the original piece is something called “Psyche Rock” by Pierre Henry and Michel Colombier, an early experiment in electronic music that was recorded in 1967. Here’s the video, which even boasts some similar imagery to the Futurama opening:

See more funny videos at CollegeHumor

 

Funny, I always thought the Futurama theme was a variant of “Louie Louie.” Shows you what I know…

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Mar062008

The Appeal of Carson

A couple years back, I devoted a pretty large chunk of copy to trying to explain what I thought was so cool about the late Johnny Carson.

Larry Aydlette sums it up in a single line:

There was something adult, sophisticated and boyishly wink-wink naughty all at the same time.

And he provides some video evidence of what he’s talking about, too:

An appropriate thing to post at this time of night, no?

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Mar062008

Duncan MacLeod vs. John Amsterdam

During the mid-90s, I was borderline obsessed with a television show called Highlander: The Series. Don’t feel bad if you’re not familiar with it. It was a low-budget syndicated spin-off from a relatively obscure movie, and it aired in the wee hours of the morning in many markets, so about the only regular viewers it ever had were insomniacs, night watchmen, and hardcore fanboys. (Actually there seem to be many more fangirls of this series, fairly unusual in sci-fi and fantasy fandom circles.)

One of these days, I’d like to do a detailed entry in which I attempt to explore why the 1986 Highlander film and the subsequent TV version appealed so strongly to me at that point in my life, but that’s not really important right now. For the purposes of this entry, let me simply lay out a few important facts about the show:

  • The protagonist, Duncan MacLeod, is a 400-year-old immortal man who can only be killed by decapitation. He can recover from any other “fatal” injury.
  • Each episode of the series features a number of historical flashbacks which both flesh out Duncan’s long backstory and have some bearing on the episode’s present-day plotline.
  • A significant portion of Duncan’s backstory involves American Indians. (He lived among them for a time when he was trying to find peace and solace from his troubles.)
  • Above all else, Duncan yearns to have a “normal” life, to have children and grow old with a woman he loves. This may be possible if he wins “The Prize.” (It’d take too long to explain right now; just trust me on this one.)
  • Duncan has a friend and confidante who knows about his secret immortality. This friend is an older man who owns a bar and plays blues guitar.
  • Duncan is not a cop, but he often finds himself in law enforcement-type situations, solving mysteries, helping the helpless, defending the innocent, looking for killers, etc.

Okay, have you got all that? Now let’s consider a few things about a new series I caught for the first time tonight called New Amsterdam:

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Feb292008

TV Title Sequence: The Fantastic Journey

Today’s title sequence is something of a departure in that I don’t actually remember this one. I remember the show — this is the one I mentioned the other day that I used to think I might have imagined — and there are some familiar elements in the video clip, but the sequence as a whole is a total blank spot. See if it rings a bell for you:

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Feb262008

More Streaming Classics

Chenopup already let the cat out of the bag in the comments to the previous entry, but in case you don’t read those, here’s a follow-up to the news about CBS.com streaming classic television episodes: NBC.com is doing the same thing with some its old shows, namely The A-Team, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, the original Battlestar Galactica, the disco-rific Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (mmmm, Erin Gray), Emergency!, Miami Vice, and Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. (You trivia hounds may remember that Steven Spielberg’s first job was directing Joan Crawford in an episode of Night Gallery…)

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