Yesterday, I posted some excerpts from interviews conducted for the campus radio program University Close-Up in the late 60s and early 70s. One interview was so good that I transcribed it in full (except for the questions, which were summed up by a narrator anyway and are summed up even more by me). So here it is:

Rod Serling on University Close-Up - April 30, 1970

"My two teenage daughters informed me, and continue to inform me, that my taste in the muse are decidedly anachronistic. 18-year-Jodi makes the point with almost deadening repetition and consistency that only Rod McKuen speaks to the moment and at the moment. She eschews everything written back to the time of the Greeks as irrelevant. Oddly enough, or perhaps not so oddly, these teenage daughters have somewhat pointed the way towards what I ought to talk to you about tonight, and that's the relevance of the arts and the mass media to the times. I find motion pictures currently being judged by college students not necessarily by what they say or how they're said, but rather - 'do they relate to the time?'

Now relevance is indeed a perfectly legitimate criteria by which an reasonably intelligent college student or for that matter anyone else can sit through a film or a television play, but where I part company with the young generation - and this includes my daughters - is when I find relevance is becoming the only criteria by which they come up with a qualitative conclusion. Now I imagine that 'Ode to a Grecian Urn' has no relevance to today's ghettos, and William Shakespeare even with his prescience can hardly be quoted in any debate having to do with 20th Century social disorders.

But because they aren't relevant does not necessarily mean they are unimportant, or that they are not craftsmanlike, or that they do not contain both truth and honesty. Simply that if we are to worship at the shrine of relevance, and assume relevance is scotch-taped to a calender, we consign to ignominy some inspiring literature written over the years that may tell it like it was, and in doing so come very close to telling it like it is. See if you can distinguish between the agony of a young man in uniform in 1942, say, with the agony of his father or older brother twenty years later.

Not too long ago, I was conned into seeing a film called Easy Rider. Once again, that beloved bane of my existence daughter Jodi assured me that not since the Old Testament has anything been written that is so altogether world-shaking, important and so uniquely definitive. So at her behest and at the behest of my own students, I went to see Easy Rider. And as much as said to Peter and Dennis 'do with me as you will, young men. Move me, titillate me, doing something to me.'

Well, they did something to me. They left me with an unalterable feeling that Mr. Hopper and Mr. Fonda should open up a Honda agency in Beverly Hills and get out of acting business."Mr. Fonda, who is an altogether charming and attractive young man, rides back and forth across the screen with all the facial mobility of a cigar-store Indian." Mr. Hopper, conversely, it seems, has a Vocabulary numbering about 16 English words, all of them prefaced by quote 'like, man' unquote.

And through the welter of this pretentious, dull sameness, I did manage to detect a plot, a theme if you will. Young men who ride motorcycles carrying heroin to pedal in southern cities and are put down by Southern bigots in lunch counters have a special, tragic stature. They represent the generation of the deprived and the misunderstood. Well, I'll grant you that beards and the longhairs and the peace beads are indeed misunderstood, and they are short-changed, and they are put down by an older generation that has neither the patience, the understanding or the sensitivity to read the pulse of the young and to understand that their sense of honor is no less real than ours."

But to devote an hour and fifty-odd minutes to a prolonged motorcycle ride through scenic countrysides and idyllic communes while they cart addictive drugs across state lines turns me on not a whit. I can sympathize - and do sympathize with the victims of legitimate prejudice, but to shambling, smarmy repetitive men like Captain America and his sidekick I can't conjure up even a short sob, let alone place them in the hallowed halls of legitimate, tragic personages. But I make a prediction here that ten years from now, Easy Rider's contribution to the cinematic art will be just about as vague as Abbott & Costello or an old March of Time or a vintage newsreel.

Now not all contemporary films that are so-called relevant are Easy Rider. Midnight Cowboy is a classic example of a movie with a point of view. And while I'm not familiar in real life with anyone similar to its leading characters, I felt for them. The Graduate is another such film, Z is another one, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? is yet another. Now each one of those films talked of people and often of places that were literally outside of my experience. Their success, their honesty, lay in the fact that they made me care, that I was somehow able to feel and understand.”

Question from the audience – Given its dependence on sponsorship, why do you think TV could speak out against those same advertisers?

"For the same reason that newspapers feel no compunction about putting in an editorial against the US steel company raising its prices. Should television show any comparable timorousness in laying claim to some points of view of their own? We have so historically become wedded to a concept of sponsor and program that we have allowed sponsor to take over the thematic value of any program. It is, of course, part of the strength of a program that they can relate it to a product - The Kraft Music Hall, The Dinah Shore Chevrolet Hour, etc.

But that is incorrect and it's improper. The entertainment portion of a commercial television show should be absolutely unrelated to the advertising portion thereof. And indeed, one of the problems, one of the things that has proven such a desperate drawback to all television is that we are currently sharing the stage with such a foreign entity. You can put out the greatest Arthur Miller play on television, and 12 minutes into it, out come dancing rabbits with toilet paper.

I recollect most vividly, for example when ABC put on The Robe and about 30 seconds after the crucifixion, out come the Dove commercials. Where does taste stop? They are so concerned with offense. They don't want to offend with controversy. But they don't mind a whit offending with a distortion and with a tasteless intrusion of a commercial product with a religious experience."

Question  – Why do you feel that movies showing the youth of today in communes, as flower-children, and showing human love and 'doing your own thing' are not relevant?

"I don't say, mind you, young man, that I'm right and you're wrong. You might be right and I might be miserably wrong. All I submit to you is, at this stage, at this conjure in our society, we cannot respond to the evils of Earth by putting ourselves in a shrub-enshrouded commune. Nobody's gonna cure cancer that way. Nobody's gonna bring up world peace that way. Nobody's gonna respond to poverty that way. It's grand, doing your own thing. God love them. Let them do it. But don't go through this pretense of being God's Loved Ones, because that's simply not true. You're copping out, you're retreating from reality, and you're not facing reality (Applause)."

Question – Could you share your thoughts about the television ratings system?

"I think ratings system is some sort of mad house arithmetic that has no bearing on anything. When the ratings service represented by the Neilson services, etc. etc. went in front of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington two years ago with charts that looked like something out of NASA explaining how they can interview ten people and have that statistic reflect the taste of ten thousand. And throughout all this welter of charts and arithmetic and insanity, certain clear-headed members of the commission said 'what do you mean by that?' and they literally could not answer and walked away tails between their legs making an admission that it was balderdash, it was nonsense. And yet, that was on a Friday and on Monday they were still quoting ratings.

Case in point, and altogether interesting of late - look at the two shows that were just canceled by CBS, The Red Skelton Show and Petticoat Junction. Now, I yield to no man in my admiration of Red Skelton, as a comic, as a mimic, etc. But I thought it was getting pretty tired. And Petticoat Junction I refuse to allow to be shown in my home. I have a queasy, aged stomach that responds a little negatively to these kind of thing. Now my kids can go over to the neighbor's and watch, but I don't want them to watch it in my house.

Now, these two shows, apart from their questionable entertainment value - or indeed, say that they're entertaining - had massive ratings, both of them. And it's conceivable that Red Skelton could have gone on ad infinitum. So why did they take them off? Because suddenly the network begins to realize that the arithmetic approach to television is not the key concern. It's who watches, who buys the product.

That's why they're losing shows that appeal to the middle-aged and the older. Who's buying nowadays? It isn't them. You don't buy much on social security. From 25 to 35, that's the group, get them. And they're not watching Red Skelton. Which is suddenly - the ratings suddenly, whether they exist properly not or authentically or validly isn't the question anymore.

Another great case in point, the most singularly, historically, popular show ever done on television, in terms of percentage of people watching , was I Love Lucy. On the night Lucy had her first baby, it had literally the largest audience - larger than the moonshot, larger than the Presidential Election, larger than everything - Lucy having her baby.

On the night they took that rating, it so ran away with competition that historically in terms of percentage of people watching we've never come close to it. And yet, during that period, the sponsorship's sales - Philip Morris, they were the sponsor - their sales dropped. Figure that one out!"

So I found out earlier this week that the University Archives here at Mizzou house a complete run of a fifteen-minute campus radio show that ran in the late 60s and early 70s called "University Close-Up". I looked through the show list the other day, requested several episodes, and spent a couple hours earlier today listening to them. Many of those segments are, naturally, campus figures talking about campus issues like new developments in the School of Agriculture and the revolutionary use of motion pictures in a "Family Life" class.

Most of the shows I listened to were interviews with or speeches from some prominent figure who visited the university. Here are some highlights -

Singer Andy Williams in 1968 talking about how much things had changed in popular music recently: "For a band singer, like me - that's what I call it, a band singer - it used to be you went into a studio with an arranger, and he picked out the songs, maybe twelve songs. You recorded maybe four songs in a session, and the sessions were three hours long. You can't do that these days; The Beatles changed everything. They spend four months in the recording studio, and they do all kinds of sonic tricks, and we can't keep up. And all of the young singers now are writing their own music. I used to call myself a pop singer, but I'm not that anymore. . . . I did just meet with the Beatles. I was in London - not for a meeting, but for something else, but while I was there, I met with them. I'm doing some specials this year, and I met with the Beatles about maybe doing one of them together."

That didn't happen, obviously, but it blows my mind that it might have.

New York Times humor writer Russell Baker in 1968: "Washington is the biggest factory town in America, and like in any factory town, every time you get a new boss, you get a new way of doing things. Every time there's a new president, you change your whole way of life in Washington. When Kennedy was elected, everyone started hanging French Impressionist paintings in their houses. 'Kennedy loves French Impressionism,' they all said, so they hung up French Impressionist paintings. And daiquiris. Everyone started to drink daiquiris. That gave me heartburn. I was drinking scotch & soda - we all got to drink scotch & soda under Eisenhower - and someone said to me, 'What are you doing? Kennedy likes daiquiris. We all have to drink daiquiris now.' So for me, the Kennedy administration was three years of heartburn. And you had to learn how to fall into a swimming pool with your tuxedo on and come up smiling. Head colds. Well after that we got Johnson, so everyone took down the French Impressionist paintings and replaced them with buffalo heads. I burned my buffalo head right before I left. It had begun to get fleas."

Also Baker: "Every day I go into a big giant box, get into a little metal box, go up seven floors and sit in a box all day. When the day is over, I get into a box on wheels, drive miles out in the country, go into a box, where I take off my tie, put my feet up and watch a box. Why do I this? Why am I living in boxes, waiting for the final box?"

That Girl star Marlo Thomas in 1970 talks a lot about helping out with underpriveleged youth and a star's responsibility to do what she can to help society. It's about what you'd expect from Marlo Thomas, but I really like the bit where she says "I'm crazy about the teenagers. They aren't creeps or law-breaking people. They just need something to do, and if you ask them to help with the smaller children, they will. Like everyone else, they need something to do."

Talk show host David Susskind in 1970 talking about the Vice President of the United States and his tendency to blame television for society's ills: "Television is blamed because it's so visible. When Agnew wants someone to lash, it's a good visible target. So are movies with the new permissiveness with nudity and obscenity."

[At this point, the interviewer brings up a quote from another news personality saying, essentially, that Agnew is evil and will destroy television.]

"I don't agree. You need Agnew. He's welcome. American mediocrity has a face to it. It's all in one face now. Spiro Agnew is all that's lousy and wrong in American life. Before, it was a theoretical proposition."

2001 author Arthur C. Clarke in 1970 predicting what life will actually be like in the year 2001: "Satellite communication will be everywhere, and everyone will connect through satellite hookups. Cities as we know them will no longer exist, because they won't be necessary."

I was hoping he was going to say more on that subject, but he really didn't. He mostly just talked about how 2001 doesn't have any messages, because he doesn't believe fiction should have any, saying "If you have a message, send it Western Union. Fiction should tell a story."

Anyway, I hope you got as much of a kick out of that stuff as I did. I transcribed one interview in full, but I'm saving it for tomorrow because it deserves a full post.

I’ve been watching The Wire: Season Two lately, which reminded me that I never posted about a TV-related theory of mine. I’ve never seen another name assigned to this before. If you have, by all means, point me to it. I dug through TV Tropes for some time, but I couldn’t find anyone documenting this phenomenon.

As you may have guessed from the title, I call it Sophomore Sprawl. Technically, I suppose, it’s a variation of the Sophomore Slump, but it’s more specific. Sophomore Sprawl occurs when a series which is tightly focused in its first season tries to do too many things in its second.

The Wire is a perfect example (spoilers follow). In the first season, everything – absolutely everything – revolves around the investigation of drug dealer Avon Barksdale by a Baltimore Police detail. We get plenty of character moments along the way, but we’re watching either the cops or the criminals at all times. It was about as pure as a narrative can be.

Season two, on the other hand, is all over the place. We’re following Barksdale and his associates both in and out of jail, getting up-to-date with the members of the police detail (who begin the season scattered at various jobs), and watching a new set of characters working at a shipping dock. It’s not that the show is worse than it was in season one, necessarily. It’s just juggling several different stories, which it didn’t try to do before.

Other examples abound. Veronica Mars season one is about Veronica tracking the murderer of her best friend Lily. Season two is about Veronica trying to figure out who caused the bus crash, and also who killed a gang member, and also about the aftermath of the arrest of Lily’s killer. Lost season one is about the survivors of a plane crash on a mysterious island. Season two is about a group of people living on an island where they have a fully-stocked research station in the ground, and a creepy other group who have apparently lived on the island for several years.

All my examples are recent, you’ll notice, and the reason for this is simple – until the last decade-and-a-half or so, TV shows didn’t have much scope at all. They established a formula and stuck to it. That’s not a criticism; it’s just true. Only recently have things shifted to a model where the status quo is expected to change.

But it does point to a possible explanation for the prominence of sophomore sprawl on TV these days – shows aren’t built to last forever anymore. The storytelling engines (to borrow a phrase from John Seavey) of these shows are designed to tell one story. (Lost excepted, of course. It’s more likely that storytelling engine was designed to leave many unanswered questions when the show fell victim to early cancellation.)

The first seasons of these shows are very carefully crafted – the creators likely spent years developing the concept to their satisfaction. For obvious reasons, the second season can’t have the same luxury – it has to get out there. This is often the cause of the “sophomore slump”. But why, specifically, does it cause sophomore sprawl?

When developing the second seasons, the creators have to deal with threads leftover from the first season as well as move the story forward. Consequently, they don’t have adequate time to fully address anything and the shows give off the appearance of having bitten off more than it can chew.

Again, I certainly don’t mean to imply that sophomore sprawl indicates a complete loss of quality. Rather, it usually amounts to a creative wobble early in the season before producers figure out how to effectively balance all of the storylines. Lost recovered quite quickly, as did The Wire.

I’ve been using the same few examples repeatedly in this post, and that’s where you come in. Is this not as much of a trend as I think it is? Can you think of other examples of sophomore sprawl?

 

It might be ironic and hip to make fun of Saved by the Bell, but I have no intention of doing that. Indeed, the show was really awful, but everyone knows that. So why dwell on it? Rather, I just want to point out the existence of E! True Hollywood Story: Saved by the Bell:



It's fascinating, to me, to watch those involved talk about the show years later. Creator Peter Engel and other crew members seem to think it was a clever and creative show. Dustin Diamond, here, just seems kind of perplexed about the whole thing. Haley Mills seems kind of embarassed, although she shouldn't - her work as Miss Bliss was typically fine. And Dennis "Belding" Haskins reveals that, even though the part was written for someone "over fifty and black", he knew he had to have the part.

Anyway, there it is. It's pretty entertaining.

My father, as a general rule, does not make pop culture references. He doesn't think they're funny, and he often calls his sons "stupid" for "talking about that crap all the time".

Every once in a while, though, he'll make reference to a TV show or movie without warning. When he does, it always makes me laugh for three reasons. One, I don't expect it. Two, his delivery is, as always, stone-faced and straight-forward, like he's talking about algorithms or something. Three, his references never quite make sense, which makes the attempt even more amusing.

Today I was sitting at the table with two slices of buttered bread on my plate.

My dad sat down next to me and said, "Hey, Two Breads. Instead of Two Sheds. Two Breads."

He sat there like a statue. I went nuts. Then he smirked.

Well played, fatherly one. Well played.

(Here's the sketch he's referring to, by the way -

So I wrote this article for Tough Pigs today, and while I was doing so, I started thinking -

The Muppets used to be a popular entertainment choice among the young people of America, and now they aren't.

The fan base is aging and shrinking, and no one new is coming in to pick up the slack.

Pretty much everyone knows what Muppets are, but many people think they no longer produce new Muppet stuff.

In recent times, the Muppets have gotten farther and farther away from what made them popular in the first place in an attempt to seem "hip" and "edgy" (Muppets Wizard of Oz, of example, was full of pop culture references and mildly dirty jokes).

Weighing all of this evidence, I can only come to one conclusion -

Muppets and Superhero Comics are the same thing.

So today, solidfoamsoul and I somehow ended up comparing various Doctors from Doctor Who to characters from M*A*S*H. Here's what we came up with -

First Doctor (William Hartnell) = Colonel Potter (Harry Morgan). They're both curmudgeonly and old.
Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton) = Radar (Gary Burghoff). They're both much wiser than they look.
Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) = ? (We couldn't think of anyone for this. Any suggestions?)
Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) = Corporal Klinger (Jamie Farr). They're both funny and awfully strange.
Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) = BJ Hunnicut (Mike Farrell). They're both straight-forward, genial fellows.
Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) = Charles Emerson Winchester (David Ogden Stiers). They're both kind of pompous and arrogant
Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) = Lt. Colonel Henry Blake (McLean Stevenson). They're both, initially at least, kind of befuddled and quick-tempered.
Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann) = Margaret Houlihan (Loretta Swit). They are both women.
Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) = Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda). They both mask indignation and angst under wisecracking exteriors.
Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) = Trapper John McIntyre (Wayne Rogers). They both just love to crack wise.

We also decided that Dr. Sidney Freeman (Allan Arbus) is The Face of Boe, because they both specialize in advice. And Colonel Flagg (Edward Winters) is The Master, because they're both crazy and evil.

A look at the "International versions" section of The Office Wikipedia page reveals that the British original has inspired five remakes in foreign countries (the US, France, Germany, French-speaking Canada, and Chile) with a sixth (in Russia) set to premiere soon. That will be six versions, plus the original, in just seven years since the series premiered.

The reigning king of foreign remakes is, of course, Sesame Street, which has seen thirty-two different international co-productions since it premiered in 1969. The Office has quite a long way to go if it wants to catch up.

Of course, after Sesame Street had been on four seven years (1969-1976), it had only inspired three other versions - in the Netherlands, Germany, and Brazil. The Office has twice that already.

In conclusion, The Office is on pace to have sixty-four international versions by the year 2040.

Well, there are only seventeen months left in this decade (have we decided what to call it yet? Is it “the aughts”?), and I think it might be time to start discussing what the definitive TV shows of the decade are. We could still see great movies, or albums, or books – those things come out as single entities. Any lasting TV shows that premier from here on out are unlikely to really find their footing until “the aughts” become “the tens”.

So what TV shows – one comedy and one drama – best sum up trends we’ve seen in American TV during the last eight-and-a-half years? It sitcom is easy – it has to be Arrested Development. That series has the one-camera/no-laugh-track format shared by shows like The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm, the cutaways and flashbacks found in Family Guy and Scrubs, and the same casual, assumed focus on dysfunctional family as Two and a Half Men and Malcolm in the Middle (which is different from 90s-style Roseanne “look how dysfunctional we are” shows where it was part of the shock. The newer series assume that all families are dysfunctional.)

It also uses sexual content not for shock value, but as background for jokes and character moments, much like shows from 30 Rock to Sex & the City (again, this is different from the 90s, where often the whole joke was “Hey, look. We’re talking about sex.”) Almost anything that marks a comedy as being “from the aughts” can be found in Arrested Development.

It’s harder to choose a drama. The past decade has seen no shortage of trends in TV drama. Shows like The Wire and Lost are dense with continuity and hard to begin watching in the middle of the series – each new episode depends on the viewer’s knowledge of what has come before. Lost and, to an even greater degree, Battlestar Galactica have shown that it’s possible to be a genre show and both be critically acclaimed and tell universally gripping stories. Shows as diverse as Six Feet Under, House and, again, Lost have shown a refusal to stick to a status quo, with situations and characters changing at a rate previously unheard of. Speaking of Lost one last time, it offers the most prominent use of time as a device – time on many shows is no longer linear, but bounces back and forth as suits the storytelling needs of the creators.

So far it looks like I’m going to say Lost is the quintessential aughts-era drama, but I’m not. While it would be a fine choice, there are a few other criteria that it doesn’t meet. First of all, we’ve seen a trend towards morally ambiguous (or downright evil) lead characters – Tony Soprano on The Sopranos, Vic Mackey on The Shield, Dexter on Dexter. Finally, the decade has been positively stuffed with procedural dramas – the CSIs, Law & Order spin-offs, Cold Case, Without a Trace, Bones and many others. If any show is going to sum up the decade’s dramas, it has to include elements of a procedural. Lost is a mystery show, but it doesn’t follow any procedure I’ve ever heard of.

If it isn’t Lost, what is it? What show combines all of these elements – heavy continuity, changing status quo, morally ambiguous hero, playing around with time, a combination of genre and procedural elements? Well, to find it, we’ll have to go back to the very beginning of the decade, when the WB was airing a series called Angel. That’s right, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s younger brother positively defines television drama in the past decade.

Look at the evidence –

-          By the time the show had entered its third season, it was impossible to follow without having watched not only the first two seasons of Angel, but also the first three seasons of Buffy. If that’s not impenetrable continuity, I don’t know what is.

-          The status quo on the series changed constantly. There wasn’t a huge amount of character turnover, but every single character was put through an avalanche of changes over the course of the series. This was best symbolized by the series’ two moves to a new home base for the main characters. It was a series that always moved forward, never stopping to put things back the way they used to be.

-          Angel wasn’t the most devious lead character ever to appear on television, but he did kill when necessary, and in his previous incarnation as evil vampire Angelus, he was a brutal mass murderer. That persona resurfaces a couple of times during the course of the series, and he’s still our main character – even as he’s gleefully slaughtering innocents.

-          That’s where the manipulation of time came in – the series spent a great deal of time flashing back to delve into the back story of Angel or other immortal characters.

-          It has the genre elements, obviously. It’s a show about a vampire. As for universally gripping, it was never as popular as Buffy, but I think that’s mostly because it’s harder to get in to. Anyone can start watching Buffy, but only those who already know that they like the parent show will watch Angel, despite the fact that they’re very different stylistically. I'm going to say that it isn't about demons, because it is. But if Buffy was, at heart, a show about trying to make it through high school, Angel was a show about how you never stop trying to figure out how to be an adult. Everyone can relate to that.

-          On the critical acclaim side, the show has had several books written about it in the years since it ended, and I know it is frequently used in college classes and the like.

-          It’s not just a show about a vampire – it’s about a vampire who happens to be a private detective, which is where the procedural elements came from. Many episodes featured Angel Investigations working a specific case, which would be resolved by the end of the episode.

So as you can see, Angel is it, folks. Just a couple of final notes – like many series are now, Angel was shot in widescreen. It was one of the first such shows on network television. Also (SPOILER), it has an abrupt, cliffhanger-type ending with no resolution. Just like The Sopranos.

You might disagree with my choices. If you do, you should let me know what you think the definitive comedy and drama of the decade are.

I've been meaning for a while to post some of the pieces I wrote as a commentator for college radio. This one was written in April of 2007. It has some references to it being April of 2007, but don't let that distract you. Anyway, it's pretty silly.

T-Ball? More like Commie Ball

Well, it’s April (once again, that's 2007 - author), and spring is here, and that can only mean one thing – yes, TV shows are new again until the end of the season! Lost, The Office, Gilmore Girls, a bunch of shows I don’t watch – all back until the middle of May. I can’t wait to see what happens on the island, at Dunder-Mifflin, in Stars Hollow. However, this piece doesn’t have anything to do with that, because spring is also baseball season. The MLB is in full swing, my friends. I’m sure Moises Alou, Reggie Jackson, Ted Williams and the whole gang are having a swell time hitting balls, shagging flies and running bases.

However, I’m not here to talk about them either, or even about the MLB. At a lower level, kids all across the country are getting ready for summer baseball, which should start up shortly after the season finale of Lost. There’s an organization for boys of every age – Legion for high schoolers, named after a team of DC Comics superheroes; Babe Ruth for junior high boys, named after that guy Benny Rodriguez dreams about in The Sandlot; and Little League for upper elementary kids, named after Little Luth, the mascot of the National Lutheran Youth Convention.

Well, based on the fact that I’m turning their names into terrible pop-culture references, it’s probably obvious by now that I’m not actually too interested in any of these levels of baseball. What I am interested in, however, is the lowest level of organized baseball play – Tee ball, for ages 6 through 8. T-ball isn’t regular baseball, of course, as it modifies the game in a number of ways, theoretically to make it easier for young children to play. Unfortunately, it has a much more negative effect in practice. Easier? Maybe, but certainly far more Soviet-esque.

Yes, friends – tee ball mirrors the threat of international communism in a number of ways, starting with the title figure – the “tee” itself. Similar to a golf tee, but much larger, it allows every player to hit the ball with little or no effort. Much like Stalin’s infamous Five-Year-Plan, this gives the appearance that everyone is skilled and productive. Even the bad kids can hit the ball nearly every time. This, of course, gives them a sense of false confidence, allowing them to think they’ll be able to beat the US to the moon. When they find out later in life that this isn’t true, they’ll only be disappointed.

This spread-the-wealth mentality continues in the structure of every inning. Rather than having three outs per team per inning (or four, or seven or any other number), tee ball allows every player on both teams to bat every single inning. On the surface, of course, this also appears to give everyone an equal chance. Each boy gets a chance and everyone is happy. In reality, of course, it just puts the teams at the mercy of the governmental structure. Like the Berlin Wall, the much-bally-hooed “Laaaaast Batterrrrr!” signals a split between innings that can not be moved.

Finally, at the end of every tee ball game, both teams are always told that they won, and well. In the history of the sport, no team has ever scored less than 30 runs and no opponent has scored more than 5. Just as Stalin told the people of Russia that they were leading the world in every conceivable area, these kids are told that they are unstoppable. This serves no purpose other than to tear them down when they lose at life, but this doesn’t matter to short-sighted Bolshevik coaches. They have only their immediate concerns in mind.

All I really mean to say is this – tee ball might seem like innocent fun, but every kid who plays it is going to grow up someday. They’ll remember the lessons they learned in tee ball, much better than the baseball skills. They’ll grow up to idolize Vladimir Lenin, not Vladimir Guerrero.

So bromanempire pointed this out to me a few days ago. Apparently I'm running a My Name is Earl fansite. Who knew?

Today, while packing for my upcoming move, I found a bunch of notebooks from college. In between taking notes, I would often turn to the back on a notebook and start writing random things. Often, this took the form of a list. I had apparently forgotten just how geeky these lists were. Today, I found all 43 recurring or regular characters on Buffy, all 13 Beatles albums, all 16 Martin Scorsese movies I had seen at the time, and (then) all 38 members of the Justice Society of America. Each of those lists, and dozens of similar ones, were ranked in order of my personal preference.

So that was what I did for fun in college. Currently, I'm making a note reminding myself to not do the same thing in graduate school.

I’ve been watching The Dick Van Dyke Show: Season Two, and I think I’ve developed a crush on Sally Rogers, the female half of Rob’s writing staff at The Alan Brady Show (of course, I’ve always wanted to be Buddy Sorrell, the male half, but that’s a completely different story). If you’re familiar with the show, you’re certainly aware that Sally’s inability to get a date with anyone but Herman “Warm Milk” Glimsher is a prominent running gag.

That’s ridiculous, I say. Sally’s pretty attractive in an off-beat way. She’s smart – she’s generally more in control of any situation on the show than either of her co-writers - and she’s all kinds of quick-witted and funny. She works on a hit TV show. There must be guys out there in early-60s New York City who’d be dying for a girl like her, right? Not to mention that her circle of friends includes Rob Petrie and Buddy Sorrell, who are by all accounts hilarious guys. Her boyfriend would probably get to hang out with them all the time. Heck, I’d date Sally in a second if I lived in the same time period and were both single and fictional.

Of course, you know what? 30 Rock tries to pull the same conceit with Liz, played by Tina Fey. And that’s even sillier. Why can’t intelligent, funny TV writers be objects of desire, huh, TV writers? Just what do you have against, um, yourselves?

When Family Matters premiered on ABC in the fall of 1989, it was little more than a pale imitation of The Cosby Show. You had an African-American family, sitting around relating to each other in loosely plotted stories. The show didn't really develop its own identity until Steve Urkel became a regular. This would eventually lead to the show doing decidedly non-Huxtable-esque stories involving things like robots, cloning, and time travel.

Never was the Cosby influence more evident than in this episode from late in the first season. In 1985, The Cosby Show had done a story where the Huxtable children performed for Cliff's parents on their 50th anniversary, as seen in this clip.

While the Family Matters episode in question is far from a direct lift - it involves eldest child Eddie shooting a music video for a contest - it's certainly an attempt to capture the same feeling. The problem is that while the Cosby Show Ray Charles number was unbelievable in a charming way (watching it, you almost wish you had a family capable of pulling together to put on a show like that), the Family Matters rap is just bizarre. The song isn't catchy, the jokes aren't funny, and you never believe that Eddie wrote and directed it himself.


Now, yes, I'm insulting a sitcom episode from 1990 for no reason at all. But my point is this - this is a series with no real reason to exist. This scene is strange, but mostly it's just laughably bad. By allowing a supporting character to completely take over, the series became something intensely memorable. Say what you will about UrkelBot or Steevil the Dummy, but you won't soon forget them.

Recently, I read the entire run of DC Comics’ Starman by James Robinson. As far as I’m concerned, Starman is as true a masterpiece as has ever been produced in fiction of any kind – a large cast of well-written characters, a plot that continually builds to an amazing climax, consistently fun side-stories along the way. I’ll probably go into more detail about why I love Starman so much another time. In the meantime, check out Scott Tipton’s overview of the series at Comics 101.

This post concerns one particular issue - #54, published in April 1999. This is a terrific story, flashing back to 1899 to tell a story of Opal City, its citizens, and an object of great importance to our characters in the present. But I own the series in single issues, so it’s not just a story – it’s also a vehicle for delivering advertising. In this issue, two ads jumped out at me, and both of them were promos for new prime-time cartoons about to debut on FOX. I don’t know how comic book readers at the time reacted, but the two ads reveal a great deal about the respective quality of both shows.

First, on the inside front cover:

Here we get a tiny glimpse of the world of Futurama. We don’t really learn anything about the characters, except that one is named Fry and looks like a hipster. We don’t even know who Fry is. He might be a celebrity within this world, endorsing this product. What we do learn is that Futurama takes place in a universe where Earthlings have made contact with other planets. More importantly, though, it’s a world where advertising exists that promotes the tastes of alien cultures. If we want to learn more, we need to tune in to find out just what this world looks like.

Here’s the other, opposite page 7:

Here we learn that the dog can talk, and makes puns about bodily functions.

Draw your own conclusions.

So after yesterday’s post, I was thinking about character actors and also Robin Hood. Naturally, my mind rolled around to Disney’s 1973 version. It’s a movie that gets a lot of criticism for employing familiar character actors to play character roles, but I don’t think it deserves to. All of the actors are terrific. They might be playing themselves, but they’re doing a bang-up job of it.

Anyway, I realized today that five characters in the movie are voiced by actors who had supporting roles on series which aired on CBS. Five! All from CBS!

Phil Harris (Little John) played himself as the smooth-talking bandleader of The Jack Benny Program for sixteen seasons on radio (1936-1952).

Ken Curtis (Nutsy the Vulture) played scraggly deputy Festus Haggen on the last eleven seasons of Gunsmoke (1964-1975).

George Lindsey (Trigger the Vulture) played replacement gas station attendant Goober Pyle on the last four seasons of The Andy Griffith Show (1964-1968) and all of the weak replacement series Mayberry R.F.D. (1968-1971).

Pat Buttram (The Sheriff of Nottingham) played slimy local salesman Mr. Haney on Green Acres (1965-1971).

John Fiedler (Church Mouse) played meek patient Mr. Peterson on The Bob Newhart Show (1972-1978).

 

That’s kind of neat.

With Scrubs moving from NBC to ABC this fall, I started thinking about what would happen if other sitcoms switched networks. If, say, My Name is Earl went to CBS, it would probably have a laugh track, which would make a lot more sense. However, if 30 Rock were to move to another network, it would be chaos. It would change the series in a way no show has ever been affected by a network change in the past.

30 Rock takes place behind-the-scenes at an NBC program. It often pokes fun at the reality programming favored by the network, among other things. NBC, really, is an essential character. Sure, if the show switched to (for example) CBS, they could simply have TGS get canceled and picked up by CBS. They could do all kinds of jokes about multi-camera sitcoms and procedural dramas. That’d probably be okay.

Most of the characters could survive easily – if TGS were to move to a new network, it makes sense that the actors, producers and writing staff would go with it. But there would still be problems. Two of the show’s most popular characters could not credibly be brought over to a new network. Jack, played by Alec Baldwin, has spent years building a career at NBC/General Electric. Sure, at the end of last season, he was working for George Bush, but we all know he’ll be back where he belongs. But what he certainly wouldn’t do is go to work for NBC’s direct competition. Not in the long term.

The other character who would be out of place outside of Rockefeller Center (Say, that’s another thing – the name of the show is a GE-owned building. They’d have to rename the series CBS Television City) is Kenneth the page. Kenneth has spent his whole life with only one goal in mind – to aid those who work in television. The NBC page is the loftiest position one can achieve in that field. He lives to be an NBC page, and he would never abandon the dream just because one show got canceled.

Of course, this is all silly speculation for something that will never happen. If 30 Rock did get canceled, no other network would pick it up. It’s owned by NBC/Universal. Scrubs only got picked up ABC because it was owned by ABC parent company Disney. In this day and age, no network would pick up a canceled series that they won’t even own distribution rights for. Never.

Sorry for wasting your time.

Bad news.

I’m not going to take the time to explain why I so intensely dislike Family Guy (especially since Jaime Weinman already wrote the definitive post on the subject. He says it all, far more eloquently than I ever could).

Additionally, I have to admit that I understand why Google thinks this is a good idea. The kids go crazy over Seth MacFarlane, and he’ll almost certainly draw attention to websites where these ads appear. That’s unfortunate, but it’s true.

That said, it’s still a terrible, awful thing to happen. I’m not alone in disliking online advertising that talks at me – really, does anyone? – but this is a new low. Online advertising that not only talks but was created by Seth MacFarlane?! It’s bad enough that he’ll soon have three shows on TV – including the upcoming, sure-to-be-hilarious Cleveland – but now his unique brand of unfunny will interrupt me while I’m trying to listen to They Might Be Giants.

Yuck.

Like all Americans, you watched the 93^rd Annual Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest on ESPN yesterday. You don’t need me to tell you that last year’s champion Joey Chestnut beat Takeru Kobayashi, the winner of the previous six years. You saw the exciting photo finish, which was declared a tie, and you thrilled to the five-dog eat-off, which ended with Chestnut victorious by a bun heel. But did you see the symbolism? While glued to your television for ten minutes plus a five-dog eat-off, did you notice that all of American history was staring back at you?

First of all, there are the obvious things. What’s more American than rampant waste and excessive eating for absolutely no reason at all? At the Hot Dog Eating Contest, hundreds upon hundreds of hot dogs and buns are dipped in water and swallowed whole, to serve no end at all. The people eating them might not actually become obese, but a regular American who attempted the same feat certainly would.

So how are these processed-food-consuming giants different from the average man or woman on the street? Why, they represent President Herbert Hoover’s ideal of Rugged Individualism, of course! These people trained themselves from nothing – from nothing! – to achieve perfection. Men like Joey Chestnut and Kobayashi can eat as many as sixty-four hot dogs in a single sitting, and that takes an inconceivable amount of work. The rest of the nation can view them as a shining example to look up to. With a little self-motivation, all Americans could be so astoundingly productive at work.

On a completely different level, the Joey Chestnut/Kobayashi rivalry is a metaphor for the battle between the United States and the forces of Eastern Imperialism. Kobayashi is a native of Japan, while Joey Chestnut was born in the United States somewhere, probably. Kobayashi’s six wins were kind of like six Pearl Harbors. Joey Chestnut’s victory last year was the nuclear attack on Hiroshima, and this year’s was Nagasaki. That’s right. Joey Chestnut’s win at the Hot Dog Eating Contest was, in effect, Fat Man.

That’s America, gang.

No real post today. Just this holiday treat:


I didn't say what holiday.