There’s something I totally miss about TV shows. The lots-of-exposition, get-you-up-to-speed backstory origin recap intro. There’s something so earnest about it when it was done back then. To do something like this now would be to make a kind of knowing, meta-reference, like Tarantino did with Shaw Brothers kung-fu conventions and tropes when he did [...]

Sorry for the light blogging recently; I’ve been working on a gigantic post/story that will be the next thing up. It’s an epic (and epically long) tale of my grade-school fighting career. As a kind of teaser, it involves karate and glow sticks. The awesome intro to the drive-in blockbuster JADE CLAW (some prints of [...]

I discovered Lin Manuel Miranda by way of my daughter’s love for the new hip-hop flavored ELECTRIC COMPANY on PBS. I resisted the reboot of my beloved classic at first; ELECTRIC COMPANY held a special place in my heart. As a kid in the late 70s, you took your live-action Spider-Man appearances wherever you could [...]

From George Orwell’s 1984: And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced [...]

I was a devoted Channel 5 WNEW watcher as a little kid. I remember when I was in the hospital, age 3, with a ruptured appendix that led to a host of complications, having them wheel over a TV to my bed and enduring the pain of sitting up, just for a chance to catch [...]

I do not follow baseball, so I only know Jose Canseco as the twitchy, hulking  behemoth from Celebrity Apprentice.  And now, I know him as a real life supervillain, in the mold of the Fantastic Four’s arch-nemesis, Dr. Victor Von Doom. From Dr. Doom’s Wikipedia page: Doom’s calculating and strategic nature leads him to use [...]

This is a piece I wrote that appeared in Nomad Edition’s U+ME Digital Weekly magazine.  You should definitely subscribe or at least check them out; the trial is free and they are cheap once you have to pay for them. Which you don’t have to if you don’t want. This is a jedi mind trick; [...]

There was a lot of depressing back-story and continuity to the Sectaurs that they had to explain in this commercial. In my day, you got kids excited to play with toys by leading with: “A GENETIC EXPERIMENT FAILS; A CIVILIZATION DIES…” These were some of the best designed, yet somehow uninviting and hard-to-relate-to toys of [...]

Thanks, Captain Marvel. Sunday afternoon nostalgia. I lived for this show on Saturday mornings. I caught a few episodes, by way of Tivo, that aired a few years back on TVLand, or something. They kind of don’t hold up. At all. Flashback to 1979: My father never understood why they changed the comic book character [...]

I know I’m late to the game here on offering any Sheen-flavored commentary, and that the whole #winning and #tigerblood stuff was played out within 24 hours of its introduction. But I want to offer a comparison I don’t think has been made. I know that the real story has to do with some cocktail [...]

Oh, 1980s. You kind of sucked, didn’t you? Share this:PrintFacebookDigg

Yet another TV season has come around again wherein my vow to not watch stuff like THE CELEBRITY APPRENTICE is undone by my forgetting to tell Tivo to cancel my season pass from the previous year. And once it is there on Tivo’s “Now Playing” list, it is like the piece of cold pizza in [...]