The WKRP of Journals: Nobody's Reading It!

I have Syfy's Ferocious Planet, starring JFlan, on Tivo. I watched two minutes of it, then realized that when ComicbookMan gets home, I'll be forced to watch the movie all over again, so I stopped. I suspect a nice glass of wine & someone to snark it with should make it quite an enjoyable viewing experience.

( MY REVIEW OF THE FIRST TWO MINUTES, NO SPOILERS! )



When I watch the rest of the movie, I'll do a real review.

So much love for Wil Wheaton, who is so very One of Us:



Someday, we shall give a convention and he shall invited as our Most Honored Guest, and we shall call him "Squishy" and he will be our Squishy.


Also, the cast of Dr. Who sings (for various values of "singing") "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", and the ghost of Judy Garland claps a hand over her eyes:



Through the years, they all will be together, YA GET IT?

If I hear one more CNN news-mannequin self-righteously talking about those terrible, awful people parasites on society who absolutely refuse to get health insurance and decide to "roll the dice" instead, I am going to reach right through that TV screen and throttle them, or at least muss up their overly-hairsprayed and gelled hair.

NOBODY SEEMS TO WANT TO ADDRESS THE FACT, AND IT IS A FACT, THAT WE DON'T BUY HEALTH INSURANCE BECAUSE WE CANNOT EFFIN' AFFORD IT. WE WANT IT VERY MUCH, BUT WE CANNOT AFFORD IT!! WE. CANNOT. AFFORD. IT!!!! AND MANY, MANY PERFECTLY NICE PEOPLE ARE JUST LIKE US!

Not if we want to pay our rent and eat. Health Insurance is magnificently, freakishly, awesomely expensive. Even cheap-o, crappy, low-balled health insurance is beyond our ability to pay. And the state-provided* insurance can only be had if you're living in a box on the street. Seriously, we have a friend got laid off 3 years ago and has a kid, who squeezes in some shit-pay temp work when he can find it, who is coming to the end of the long, slow, horrible process of losing his house because he hasn't paid his mortgage for quite a long time -- AND HE CANNOT GET STATE-OFFERED "HEALTH INSURANCE" BECAUSE THEY SAY HE MAKES WAY TOO MUCH MONEY!

I seriously have yet to hear one news-mannequin talk about how awful it is that people cannot afford health insurance BECAUSE IT IS SO EXPENSIVE, and how unfair it is to force people to buy it or be fined when it's so far out of reach of so many of us. And how, if there was a single-payer system, it would make life so much easier for everyone, and we'd all have health insurance like the civilized countries do.







*Massachusetts, which, courtesy of that opportunistic weasel-douche-bag from hell, Mitt Romney, has that charming government-mandated thing where you must buy health insurance or pay a fine, which should be familiar to you all at this point, as it's been expanded to the rest of the country.

I first (and last) saw this (poorly) animated Dr. Suess special back in 1973. They're running it RIGHT NOW on ABCF, the ABC Family channel. OMG, it's as awesome as I remember it!!!! (so many exclamation points!) THE SONGS! THE SONGS ARE SO "LOVE AMERICAN STYLE"!!!

# Allen Sherman as The Cat in the Hat (of "Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda, here I am at Camp Grenada" fame)
# Hans Conried as the Narrator and the North-going Zax (Character actor of joy! He was on every show!)
# Paul Winchell as Sam-I-Am, the Grouchy Guy, and Sneetches

Paul Winchell was a god when I was a wee kid: we were all addicted to his kiddie show, The Winchell Mahoney Show*, wherein he acted as ventriloquist for various dummies that were quite similar to the Edgar Bergan characters that predated them, except way more subversive. He also spoofed kiddie puppet shows in general on an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show, where he played a kiddie-show ventriloquist of a sarcastically snarky puppet snail named "Jellybean" who wanted Rob Petrie to write for his show. IT WAS SO META! The episode was called "Talk to the Snail", which anticipated "talk to the hand" about 25 years before that expression was used. PAUL WINCHELL - RENAISSANCE MAN AND POP CULTURE FORECASTER! He was a voice on about a thousand poorly-animated Saturday morning kid shows during the 60s, 70s and early 80s. Snidely Whiplash on the Penelope Pitstop show and Wacky Races, anyone?

From Wikipedia:

Winchell was interested in medicine and studied pre-med at Columbia University. He graduated from The Acupuncture Research College of Los Angeles in 1974, and became an acupuncturist. He also worked as a medical hypnotist at the Gibbs Institute in Hollywood.

He was not only a ventriloquist on a kiddie show and the voice of a thousand hackneyed cartoon characters, he was THE VERY FIRST PERSON TO PATENT AN ARTIFICIAL HEART, MAKE IT AND IMPLANT IT IN SOMEONE'S CHEST.

Yes, my kiddie icons were Jean Shepherd (genius curmudgeon) and Paul Winchell (genius snark-master). This explains so much.

So, back to the Dr. Seuss special... the Sneetches tale teaches a child not to be a racist, the Zax bit teaches a child to make nice (really, to not be an asshole) and compromise, and Green Eggs and Ham probably wants to teach a kid to try new foods before judging, but really teaches that you might as well do what a persistent salesman wants you to do, because he's going to harass you into doing what he wants eventually anyway... but the songs on this 70s show, the MUSIC THEY WROTE for this cartoon. Just so Hollywood Squares.

Jeebus, it turns out that ABC Family is doing a Dr. Seuss night of ancient animated specials! The Lorax** is on now! How The Grinch Stole Christmas is last and best (Chuck Jones did the animation for that one.)



*Theme song: "HOORAY, HOORAH, IT'S WINCHELL MAHONEY TIME, IT'S WINCHELL MACHONEY TIME, IT'S LOTS OF FUN!!!! And it was.

**STOP RAPING NATURE, YOU INDUSTRIALIST BASTARDS!

Last night, I caught the fully restored Metropolis (1927) on Turner Movie Classics. It was the most recent and updated version, almost completed to its uncut original glory using some 30 minutes of footage recently found in Argentina and New Zealand film vaults. It's an excellent film, and a fascinating study in the way Some Things Never Change.

* * *

Metropolis is a vast futuristic city founded by plutocrat Joh Fredersen. The city is run as an oligarchy by the elite few, who live a luxurious life in the penthouses of skyscrapers. A vast, down-trodden army of workers support it all by living and toiling underground, in the worst conditions imaginable. So, yeah; timely!

( Wikipedia was a huge help writing this synopsis.... )So, that's my (long but extremely truncated, believe me) synopsis of Metropolis. One thing I found interesting about Metropolis was that pop culture's idea of "What Is Sexy" has been refined over many generations of visual entertainment. While on paper "half-dressed young woman dancing seductively" still works, what that means in the flesh has changed. Check out New Maria's sexy-dancing in this Metropolis trailer:



It's kind of hilarious how men who are supposed to be jaded, degenerate playboys suddenly act like repressed virgins with a wad of cash and the Pope's blessing let loose in a whore house when New Maria starts flopping around.

Here's Fox's preview of Glee's "Britney/Brittany" episode shown earlier this year:



I think Brittany in the green top dancing with the snake pretty much approximates what Lang was going for, bless his heart. She looks awesomely sexy, and I'm sure men would snap to attention if they saw her dancing at Yoshiwara (or anywhere else), but doubt that anybody would kill anybody else over her. One of the side-benefits of internet Pr0n available to all is that nobody faints over the sight of a bare ankle anymore, let alone tries to kill anyone over it.

Bonus vid:



Queen! Radio Ga Ga!

Well, my post to a site everybody on my flist has linked to, "Opinion: Atlantis fans need to stop punishing Universe", is *still* awaiting moderation. No idea why -- yeah, it's long, but there are longer comments posted, and I don't use any profanity, or even near-profanity. Believe me, there are *much* harsher comments than mine posted! Maybe they hold comments from anyone who's never posted there before? Because a lot of the fans who commented on the essay have also noted their comments have been held in limbo.

http://www.scifinow.co.uk/news/opinion-atlantis-fans-need-to-stop-punishing-universe/

Teenygozer said: Your comment is awaiting moderation.

This is ridiculous. It's true that when SGA was canceled, I was very unhappy. I loved SGA and SG-1 and all those great characters! We never missed SGA, or SG-1 when it was on, and we still watch the reruns to this day. I was even more unhappy when I read interviews with the Stargate creators that said they thought fans of SGA were old and boring, that their new show would be much more awesome than previous Stargates, and that they were looking forward to attracting a more youthful and therefore desirable demographic. Yet I wasn't so insulted that I decided to boycott SGU — I figured it was the kind of thing TPTB had to say in interviews -- it was a marketing thing, and not meant personally. After all, Stargate's PTB and I are the same age! Surely they weren't saying that they, themselves, were old!

Problem is, these guys are good at writing "penny dreadfuls" — silly, fun, crazy scripts (with a million holes in them) that don't aspire to great art, that are acted out by amusing, heroic characters. SGA won the People's Choice award, so they must have been doing something right. Unfortunately, their aspirations have risen, and they crave the critical adulation shows like BSG and Firefly have garnered — not in and of itself a bad thing, but the problem is, their talent has not risen with their aspirations. They've stripped all the joy, silliness, and wonder from their usual brand of show and substituted irritating characters, dark sets, shaky-cam, and tiresome, plodding plots, as if that's what made shows like BSG and Firefly great, not superlative writing. They haven't a clue. And they don't take constructive criticism at all well, preferring to insult in the vilest terms anyone who points out the very real problems with SGU. The quotes in this article are an example of that — still unwilling to take the blame for their well-deserved low ratings, they blame the mean ol' fans who are purposely getting in the way of their success!

My husband and I watched every single episode of SGU's first season, or we tried to. He kept falling asleep and my attention wandered. Sometimes things didn't make sense, so we'd back it up to try to figure out if we missed something, but half the time it still didn't make sense. I don't expect something I'm watching for fun to be torture to get through. BSG and Firefly were never torture to get through, so I'm not sure why these guys think that, in order to be high art, a show has to be such a joyless, monochrome drag.

The show is NOT GOOD. In fact, it is often ACTIVELY BAD. People don't like watching shows that are NOT GOOD or ACTIVELY BAD. So, dearest Brad, whose work I’ve enjoyed in the past, if you want eyes on your show, you have to make it GOOD, or at least BETTER. You do that and we'll watch it. Suggestion: hire really good script writers, and make sure some of them are women, because your female characters are truly embarrassingly, cringingly awful. But stop blaming the mean, ol' fans for your lack of success.

So, I'm watching "Weird Science" (dir. John Hughes, 1985) and it suddenly occurred to me as I watched the house tidy itself up that this movie is a kind of a dirty, slutty version of "Mary Poppins." o.O

Oh, the Eighties! It was a shameless time!

Teen-aged bad guy Robert Downey Jr. looks pretty much like today's all-growed-up Robert Downey Jr., but I find it hard to believe Anthony Michael Hall grew up out of that skinny, geeky kid.

ComicbookMan purchased a lovely Torchwood coffee mug for me last Christmas--it has a full four lines of BBC copyright notices on the bottom and a company logo for "Underground Toys", he bought it from the Diamond catalog, so it's NOT a bootleg. It's a blue/gray toned photo of Captain Jack standing valiantly in front of Torchwood with the Torchwood SUV parked in front, door opened.

What it is, is a piece of cheap crap. It is, essentially, a white china mug with a thin plastic wrap of the illustration vacuum-sealed around the outside instead of screened or printed on it. It looks like it's printed on, but if you wash the mug in hot, soapy water a few times and stick it in the dishwasher a few times (we've done both), it starts to shred right off in cheap plastic-cling-wrap strips. There is NO indication on the mug that this thing isn't dishwasher safe. It originally cost $8. It's not worth buying for a buck in a dollar store unless you plan on using the mug to hold pencils on your desk.

The endless BBC copyright notifications and store info is printed on and won't wash off, but not the photo.

Man, I always get thrown out of television shows when someone who obviously doesn't belong in a Life Drawing class (Life Drawing = nude model) waltzes in off the street without anyone demanding to know why they're there, and subsequently asking them to leave. Leave NOW. Especially someone who comes in and stares at the nude model.

This behavior is considered incredibly disrespectful. You do everything you can to let your models know they're not being exploited sexually and that you respect them and appreciate what they're doing for you -- every goddamn for-reals art student or artist knows this or *should* know this. And can you imagine how many people would wander into art classes to cop a free eyeful if this sort of thing wasn't carefully policed by whoever was running the class?

I don't care how attractive you are, you just do not come in in your suit and tie, reeking of privilege and power, make eye contact and ogle the model with a flirty smile on your lips while she's doing her job. She's not a Hooters waitress (no disrespect meant to Hooters waitresses, it's just that that's a large part of that job, and if you don't like it, you don't become a Hooters waitress.)

That scene pissed me off and made me dislike Neal quite a bit, which I do not think the writers meant to happen.

Tell me, what's better in life than watching an episode of The A-Team where Rick James sings "Super Freak" on stage while Murdock plays in the band (with two other white guys and one white chick back up singer), and B.A. Baracus counsels Isaac Haye's character off-stage that he can't retire from music because he will one day overcome his convict days and find himself back on top of the charts. Yes, this was an era when a rock singer having a *gasp!* rap sheet was considered a drawback to success!

I'm already wearing my "I love it when a plan comes together" A-Team chibi tee shirt, and I may accessorize it with big earrings and teased up hair if my brain melts just a wee bit more.