February 23rd, 2005
There be Dragons
Animal Planet is tackling the mystery of dragons on March 20th. Neil Gaiman had a hand in this show’s creation too.
I’m setting my DVR as we speak.
February 8th, 2005
Tonight
If you have Sundance Channel, please watch “With God on Our Side: George W. Bush and the Rise of the Religious Right in America” for me. It’s about:
Since the 1950s, politicians who ignored the growing power of evangelical voters did so at their own peril. In this two-part documentary, director David Van Taylor and producers Calvin Skaggs, Charles Schuerhoff and Ali Pomeroy place the character and presidency of George W. Bush in context with a brief history of the religious right’s journey from isolation to influence. Interviews with leading evangelists and rare film clips provide a revealing glimpse into recent American history and the personal story of the 43rd President of the US.
And next week watch, “The Origins of AIDS“. This doc puts forth the theory that AIDS sprang forth from the oral polio vaccine”. A theory that I’ve never heard of until now. Apparently, it’s a controversial theory.
I don’t have Sundance. Not in the budget. But you can watch and learn for me.
(tv stuff via 7d)
August 26th, 2004
Six Feet Under
Six Feet Under is the best fictionalized dramaof a family run funeral home that I’ve ever watched for enjoyment.
May 26th, 2004
Starcrossed
Crap!
I almost missed this.
I guess I’m not watching as much TV as I thought Iwas.
Never satisfied with the status quo, [Bruce] Timm ends this version of Justice League with a bang. The series finale airs on Cartoon Network at 8 p.m. Saturday.
In the 90-minute “Starcrossed,” the League must battle an alien race from Thanagar, and Hawkgirl, being from Thanagar herself, is forced to choose sides.
Bruce Timm kicks so much ass. He’s a bona fide asskicker, I’m sure of it.
April 6th, 2004
HUZZAH!
‘ It’s like Disney on acid! Ten years of really great sex all at the same moment.’
—Crichton, ‘Rhapsody in Blue’
Farscape returns to tie up the loose ends in a mini-series project named, Farscape: The Peacekeeper War
And there was much rejoice…”Yay!”
March 16th, 2004
Keen Eddie
Momiage raved about Keen Eddie on Fox last summer. I let those raves fall on deaf ears. For the first time in a long time I was actually busy the summer of 2003 and didn’t want to become invested in a new show.
That business ended badly. (More on that noise later)
It’s now early 2004 and Bravo picked up Keen Eddie and runs it constantly. And I watch it constantly. I’m always late to the party. Keen Eddie is funny. Keen Eddie’s clever. Keen Eddie should have stayed on the air a lot longer than it did.
Thanks again Fox.
February 5th, 2004
Samurai Jack
The man learns the ways of various cultures.
He trains for the day he will return to his land and rid it of the infesting evil.
That day comes and he is nigh victorious.
Evil’s treachery is forever vigilant.
The man now lives in the future and seeks entry to the past to complete the task he was denied.
The man is hunted.
The man forever adventures.
The man is Samurai Jack.
January 3rd, 2004
Progress is a good thing
You gotta love the 21st century:
LOS ANGELES (AP) – There are three stages of afterlife for a dead TV show, and a program’s fate can be decided by its unaired episodes.
Heaven is a DVD release – a kind of immortality for a series like Fox’s “Firefly” or “The Tick,” which had devoted viewerships that were too small for network advertisers but large enough to justify selling a boxed-set of discs.
Then there are the fallow summer months, a bitter purgatory where many as-yet-unseen installments of canceled shows are dumped in a last-ditch effort to fill the schedule with anything but reruns. Look for the remains of ABC’s recently axed “L.A. Dragnet” to turn up here.
Hell, in this scenario, is never to be seen nor heard from again. Among the damned – deserving or not – are Fox’s porn drama “Skin,” ABC’s supernatural thriller “Miracles” and the NBC version of the British sitcom “Coupling.”
“Firefly,” a sci-fi Western fusion series from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” creator Joss Whedon, is one canceled show whose unfinished season led to a happy ending.
The program, about a hardscrabble space crew 500 years in the future, lost its bid for survival on Fox’s fall 2002 schedule after 11 episodes, with three more finished but unaired. Whedon and crew wanted their work on those episodes shown somewhere, anywhere – and fans wanted that, too.
But Whedon resisted the idea of burning off those installments as summer filler.
“Fox still owned the property and could maybe fill a summer slot or something,” Whedon said. “But then it became an advantage. If they never aired these, then we could put them on the DVD as something that made it more exciting.”
…But cult-fan demand isn’t always enough to loosen a network or studio’s grip.
ABC’s “Miracles” starred Skeet Ulrich as a priest who investigates supernatural mysteries that may be messages from God … or the devil.
The show was canceled last spring. Only six of the 13 episodes made it to the air, and a fervent group of angry “Miracles” junkies have lobbied unsuccessfully for the DVD release of the other seven.
The show’s creator, Richard Hatem, said he doesn’t expect any miracles. The touchy subject matter of the series – a blend of horror and religious iconography – made executives nervous at ABC’s parent, the Walt Disney Co.
But the more a network buries such unaired shows, the more some fans want to see them.
“For them to simply not air the episodes came across to us as malicious,” said Angela Mitchell, a 36-year-old publicist in Hollywood, Fla., who helped organize the “Save ‘Miracles'” campaign. “I felt like someone wanted to kill the show.”
Many fans have taken to bootlegging the lost installments, making copies from foreign-market broadcasts and sharing tapes through the mail.
And for once, piracy has the support of a producer.
“Since there aren’t aggressive efforts to make a profit from the show, the loss is pretty minor,” Hatem said. “I’m never going to see another dime off ‘Miracles,’ but if people are watching and enjoying it, I’m more than happy.”
Maybe one day we’ll get to the point where we have entire series released on DVD like anime does with OAVs:
Original Animation Video (OAV)
Original Video Animation (OVA)
An OAV or OVA (the Japanese use the terms interchangeably) is a feature which is released only to the video tape rental/buy market. The feature is *not* released to the movie theaters or as a TV series.
via 7d
October 13th, 2003
I Love the 70's
I love the 70’s a hella lot more than I thought I would. Hell I even remembered a lot of the haps back then. Maybe I tapped into the collective subconsicousness of the then present day America and sorted that information for later amusement and sweet nostalgia purposes.
That or I watched too much TV back then too.
-groonk
