Tag Archives: television

A Weekend With the Doctor

Posted on by

Spent a chunk of the weekend watching old Doctor Who. Very old, as in a story from 1964 and one from 1967, survivors of the shockingly routine practice of destroying old TV shows that the BBC and other organizations used to follow. You’d think that the BBC, of any media concern, would have had some sense of history, but apparently not. Separately, I’ve read that the company was about to wipe the tapes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus when PBS showed an interest in them, and thus a crime against comedy was averted.

Anyway, I discovered that 50th anniversary Doctor Who specials are now in production, the earliest parts of which are available to us. Ann and I spent some time on Friday and Saturday watching them. Hearing about the earliest shows through the standard format of interviews-and-clips was fairly interesting, but even better, each special (so far) has included a full story featuring the particular Doctor under discussion. My interest in the series has been intermittent down the years, so I’d never seen any Doctors earlier than Tom Baker. Probably a lot of Americans and maybe even younger Brits can say that.

The two stories were “The Aztecs” and “The Tomb of the Cybermen.” First Doctor and Second Doctor, respectively. I can’t recommend watching them at one go, since they were created as serials. After a while the story arc gets tiresome – what, another complication preventing the heroes from getting back to the Tardis? Get on with it already. Spacing it out a bit would work better. But Ann insisted on watching all the way through.

Still, I found the shows entertaining. Doctor Who’s famed low-budget production values were on full display, especially when – as happened a few times during “The Aztecs,” – a character was called on to move a heavy stone door, and it’s clear that nothing more heavy than styrofoam or the like was involved. The story involved the Doctor and his companions showing up in pre-Columbian Tenochtitlan (presumably) and mixing it up high-caste Aztecs, all of whom look and sound precisely like British actors in costumes that could have done service in The Robot Vs. the Aztec Mummy. I had a hard time explaining to Ann exactly why I thought that funny.

As a story, “The Tomb of the Cybermen” seemed more cohesive and – put in context as children’s entertainment pre-Internet, pre-CGI – was probably pretty scary to many of its original audience. It involves the Doctor and his companions showing up on some desolate planet and unwisely helping to unearth a pod of Cybermen, who of course are long-running menaces bent on destroying humanity or conquering the Earth or whatever. Ann, of a more sophisticated (jaded?) generation, told me that one reason she liked the story was because the effects weren’t particularly good, thus making it less scary than the more recent iterations of Cybermen on the show.

My favorite bit was a supporting character who was supposed to be a spaceship captain. It was implied that he was an American, but he sounded like no American I’ve ever heard. I had to look this up: the actor was George Roubicek, born in Austria and saying lines written by British writers who seem to have had no ear at all for American idioms. Surprising, since even 50 years ago, weren’t a lot of American movies shown in the UK?

According to Wiki at least, Roubicek’s made much of his career doing dubbing work, and I say good for him (and he’s still alive) . He also had a small part in Star Wars. Like everyone else involved, he probably had no idea it would become the phenomenon it did. Probably the same could be said for Doctor Who.

Ten Years Later

Posted on by

Big snow predicted for tomorrow. Not a blizzard, mind you, but six inches maybe. The weathermen try to act impressed by that, but it isn’t impressive. I haven’t checked to see if the Weather Channel is trying to stick a name on it. Last time it was a noted cartoon fish (or submariner). Maybe it’ll be Winter Storm Magilla.

Oddly enough, and apropos of nothing, I never watched The Magilla Gorilla Show, though I can’t say that about other awful output of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon factory. Or at least I have no memory of it. Not sure why. I was squarely in its demographic, at least by the end of the show’s run in 1967. But there must have been something else on at the same time that I, and probably more importantly, that my brothers wanted to watch. I never even heard of the show until much later, when I listened to the theme song on a TeeVee Toons collection.

Just out of curiosity, I counted up the number of posts between the day I first posted back at Blogger, February 21, 2003, and today. It’s only a milestone because we use base 10, but base 10 it is. The total is 2,435, or almost exactly two times every three days. Not so much across the span of 10 years. I couldn’t say how many words that is, but at 300 per entry — a seat-of-the-pants estimate — that puts it around 730,000.

Two hundred words a day. Eh, any fool can do that. Even if you count the for-pay words I’ve done in the last 10 years, that might only be 800 to 1,000 words a day. That doesn’t take one into the league of Asimovian compulsive writers.

But quantity isn’t everything. I’ve enjoyed blogging in particular about those few places I’ve been over the last decade. With any luck — because life is impermanent — I’ll record impressions of a few more places here over the next decade (or in a successor blog, because blogs are impermanent, too.)

More Bullwinkle

Posted on by

Sometime in 1987, I bought a Bullwinkle clock at a clock shop in Water Tower Place. It’s one of only a few things I ever remember buying at that mall on Michigan Ave. It was an impulse purchase. When I saw it, I knew I had to have it.

Note that the numbers are in reverse order. The hands moved counterclockwise, and the clock kept good time, only backwards. I hung it in my apartment in Chicago from ’87 to ’90, and more than one person commented on how confusing the clock was.

Near Bullwinkle is a copyright mark, “1987 P.A.T. Ward,” so I hope the $20 or so I spend provided a bit of income to Jay Ward (d. 1989), who deserved to profit mightily from Bullwinkle. On the back is “H.I. Enterprises, Milwaukee.” Not Frostbite Falls, but not too far away.

At some point (I think), a battery leaked and damaged the movement, so it doesn’t run any more. But years ago I hung it on the wall in my office over the large bookcase all the same. Recently I took it down for dusting, and had Ann pose with it.

New Media Moose & Squirrel

Posted on by

Not long ago, Ann wanted to see something on Hulu, and came to me for suggestions. I discovered that regular old Hulu, not the pay-extra Hulu, offers Rocky and Bullwinkle. I picked Season 2, Episode 1, the beginning of the shaggy-moose story about Upsidasium.

Upon further investigation, I discovered that as a story arc, “Upsidasium” has its own Wiki page. According to that source, it was the second-longest story arc for Moose & Squirrel, coming in at 36 episodes. The fictional metal also appears on this list.

Ann’s taken a liking to the show, and asks to watch it more often than I have time for, and we’re not done with the Upsidasium story yet. We have some Rocky and Bullwinkle on VHS (or, to be pedantic, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends), but it’s been years since she’s seen any of those.

She’s also been taking pictures of some of the characters. I thought the one she took of Mr. Know-It-All (above, in a sauna) turned out well, considering it’s a shot of a video in progress on a laptop. This is a Mr. Know-It-All I’m particularly fond of.

Thursday Salmagundi

Posted on by

While working on an article the other day, I came across a press release that said in part: “Seminole Classic Casino, the first Native American Casino in the country, today celebrated its grand re-opening…. Seminole Gaming CEO Jim Allen provided welcoming remarks and historical background of the casino, while Good Times television personality Jimmie ‘J.J.’ Walker warmed-up the crowd with Tribal and 1970s trivia.”

Jimmie Walker. Now there’s a name I hadn’t heard in a long time. I hope the Seminoles paid him a reasonable amount. Even has-beens have to make some kind of living. 1970s trivia? Such as, “What was Jimmie Walker’s catchphrase?” I’m not going to repeat it here. If you know it, you know it. If not, leave it be.

Snippet of recent conversation:

Ann: “Lance Armstrong, he’s the one who went to the Moon?”

Me: “No, that was Neil Armstrong. He was a test pilot, astronaut and explorer. Lance Armstrong is a guy who can stand riding a bicycle for hours and hours.” (Link includes salty George Carlin language.) (And if you’re going to sit on a bike for that long, maybe you need the drugs.)

I was toying with the idea of reading only books that I already own this year. Got a fair number on the shelves that I haven’t gotten around to, after all. But I was at the library the other day and that notion flew out the window. I was looking for The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey  (Candice Millard), which is about TR’s expedition to one of the remotest of the Amazon’s tributaries in 1914, but it was checked out, so I checked out 1920: The Year of Six Presidents by David Pietrusza.

Not that there were six serving U.S. presidents in 1920, unlike the four emperors of AD 69. Just one: Wilson, a shadow of his former self by then. But the book promises to track TR (odd, since he was dead by 1920), Harding, Coolidge, Hoover and FDR and their involvement in the 1920 election. I’ve only read a few chapters. So far, not bad, but Pietrusza has a few annoying writing tics, and I’ve spotted a couple of small errors. The Armistice did not, for example, take place at 11:11 am.

I’m going to stick with it for now, because 1920 was a pretty interesting year in this country, besides for the election of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge: the last of the Palmer raids and the Red Scare, the beginning of Prohibition, the Wall Street bombing, the final push to secure women’s suffrage, and the first commercial radio station on the air, whose first broadcast concerned the results of the election. Among other things.

I just looked up salmagundi, long a favorite word. Never looked into its origin before. I’d have guessed it was one of those words the English language picked up in British India. Sounds like it, doesn’t it? “Sahib, the salmagundi is served.”

But no. My American Heritage New College Dictionary tells me it’s from French, salmigondis, and before that, origin obscure. Just another one of the French food words, then. Maybe next time I’ll call a jumble like this a gallimaufry, another good word that needs more use, also with a Frenchy origin.

The Mad Little Boot

Posted on by

I, Claudius, that remarkable combination of comedy and horror, is worth watching (again) for many reasons, but few better than seeing John Hurt do Caligula. Such as in this scene, which only goes to show there’s no profit in reasoning with a lunatic who also happens to hold absolute power.

It’s all a fine production all the way through, but once Caligula is offed, the story loses a bit of its spark. A bit of its insane spark, that is.

Here We Go Again

Posted on by

The New Year came in here with the noise of minor fireworks set off in the neighborhood. Technically illegal in Illinois, but it’s a ban than no one cares about twice a year. I insisted that we turn down the TV so we could hear actual noisemaking, rather than the televised noisemaking, at least for a few minutes.

I watched about 20 minutes — the circa 11 p.m. CST minutes — of the Ghost of Dick Clark Rockin’ from the Beyond New Year’s Eve Special, or whatever they call it now. The presence on the show of dimwit Jenny McCarthy, who’s a hazard to public health, was off-putting.

Got up late this morning. I had work to do prepare to file stories for tomorrow, but I tried to go slow. The day was sunny but very cold. At one point I went out driving with Lilly so she could drive along some more low-traffic streets. I watched a couple of episodes of I, Claudius on my computer, which I haven’t seen in 20 years or so; it’s not just for PBS anymore, and boy is it still excellent TV. We had a fine New Year’s dinner after dark. All in all, it was a good way to start a year.