What's Hopper Been Watching?

Well, since we’ve become a nation of tube junkies due to the varying degrees of lockdown enforcement, my teevee watching has probably doubled if not tripled. Pre-Covid I might have watched two or three shows with any regularity. Most of my viewing was movies and sports – baseball and football primarily, though the wife and I got into English premier league soccer last year, due in no small part to Patch, the up-and-coming fútbol player in the family.

Since professional sports are now “woke,” I don’t watch ’em. That clears up 3-6 hours a week. But now as a family, much to my chagrin, we all gather round to worship the idiot box for 2-3 hours a night. Much as I hate it, it is an addiction. And, dammit, I’m going to have to go cold-turkey rogue to overcome it. More thoughts on that later.

But let’s skip on the heavy stuff for the moment. What have we been watching? Last I checked in on this topic was April, when the initial lockdown was in full swing. Hmm. Let’s see. There’s been a lot of viewing, and a lot of it kinda blurs into meaninglessness.

I don’t have the photographic memory for teevee shows that I do for books, so let me wing this. In no particular order, then:

A second go-round with The Office, from season 3 to 9, because the girls love it.

Designated Survivor, with Kiefer Sutherland, a kind of cross between 24 and The West Wing, first two seasons. (I stopped when it because too left-wing.)

All six seasons of Arrested Development (1-4 absolutely hilarious; 5-6 were a mistake). We’re currently re-watching it, nearing the end of Season One.

Netflix specials on Epstein and Rudy taking down the New York mob.

The Netflix special on the brutal murders done by Chris Watts out in Colorado in 2018.

Various horror flicks with the little ones: Doctor Sleep, The Amityville Horror, Carrie, Phantasm, Event Horizon, Phantoms, Fright Night (both original and poorer remake), The Blair Witch Project, The Bat, and Dementia 13. Mostly with 16-year-old Little One, the gentler funner ones with 12-year-old Patch. None with the wife, who isn’t a horror / SF aficionado.

The Impractical Jokers Dinner Party has been a hit with us, proving that those four guys still have it after eight years. Bring back the regular format!

And our latest binge, The Blacklist, where we are somewhere in the middle of Season Three.

With increased watching, there were an increased amount of duds watched:

Half an episode of Steve Carrell’s Space Force – terribly unfunny.

Tried The Haunting of Hill House but couldn’t get past episode one due to the lesbianism. The Witcher was way too post-modern for a medieval-ish series. The Viking themed The Last Kingdom was a little too violent for violence’s sake.

Thought Russell Crowe’s campy Unhinged might be a fun flick to watch with the girls. It started out decently, but then veered sharply into stupidity.

Patch watches a lot of the anime sci fi shows, and I watched a couple with her. The wife watched The Boys, but I passed as I’ve been over the whole comic book stuff fifteen years ago. Little One watches a whole host of SVU and CSI themed shows that I joke she’s on track to be either an FBI profiler or a coroner in some big city morgue.

Of course, since Thanksgiving, the wife has wrangled the girls into a bunch of Hallmark Christmas movies. I lay in the corner of the living room perusing whatever current nonfiction I’m into, pausing to crack a joke here and there as the movie allows.

When I’m alone, I usually watch something out of left field if I can (something like, say, the phenomenal Ingmar Bergman on one side of the spectrum to the cheesy badness of The Cloverfield Paradox on the other). I tape the more intellectual astrophysics shows I can find (usually Nova) and some of the WW2 documentaries on the various History channels. I’m also lobbying the girls to watch Tom Hanks’s WW2 Battle of the Atlantic flick Greyhound, with me, but that hasn’t happened yet.

Oh well. I’ve still managed to put away 53 books so far this year plus start writing two new novels, so it’s not that the lovecraftian eldritch octopus optical monster in our living room has completely possessed me.

Only partially.

Couch Potatoes

Like just about everyone during this lockdown, I guess, we’ve become couch potatoes. At least in the evening. During the day the wife and I “telecommute” and the girls “teleschool.” In the afternoon, if it’s nice, they hang out on the deck. Patch does her soccer drills at the park. They alternate walking the dog. Sometimes I walk in the morning with my headphones on. Sometimes the wife does.

But what we’ve all been doing for the last forty days or so, is watch TV in the evening. I read someone somewhere who wrote, “If Netflix existed in 1776, there would never have been a Revolution.” I kinda agree. But that hasn’t stopped me from the cultural indoctrination.

Politics and philosophy aside, I wondered this morning as I was showering just how much I’ve watched. I then compiled a list. It’s surprising in its length. Or, rather, not.

In approximate chronological order:

Jack Ryan, Season One (8 episodes)

Jack Ryan, Season Two (8 episodes)

Jim Gaffigan comedy special

The Hunt for Red October

Patriot Games

A Hard Days Night

Thirteen Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi

Captive State

Community, Seasons One, Two, and Three (50+ episodes)

Tiger King (8 episodes)

Tiger King and I

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events

The Karate Kid

1917

Extraction

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

And that’s just the stuff I can remember nearly six weeks in. Altogether that’s something like 75 or 80 hours in total, about two hours a night. Sounds about right. Additionally, Little One is working her way through all ten seasons of The Walking Dead (we forbade this when she was younger; now she’s going on 16). Patch still watches her cartoons and Disney-style flicks. And the wife and my oldest watch Outlander and SVU. There really isn’t any shows/series I watch by myself. In fact, with the house constantly occupied since March 21 the TV / living room hasn’t ever really been unoccupied.

Couch potatoes.

The Walking Desensitized

Oh no!  That minor secondary character is trapped and going to get eaten by zombies!

Oh no!  Will one of the major characters trying to rescue him get eaten by zombies too?

A dozen zombie skulls are split, smashed, shot, chopped, whacked, hacked, thwacked, walloped, cleaved, sheared, severed, and bifurcated.

Oh no!  There goes the minor secondary character in a gruesome orgy of violence!

Oh no!  There goes one of the major characters in a similarly gruesome orgy of violence!

And yet I keep on watching …

In Search Of ... In Search Of

I lied!  I lied!

Here’s one more (final) piece on Leonard Nimoy: how I absolutely loved his late-70s show In Search Of.  So much so that I still watch episodes on youtube to this day.  Here are two nostalgic posts I did on the show, the first three years ago and the latter last summer:

* * * * *

Thinking about the self-inflicted demise of The History Channel (a Swamp People marathon tonight. Really? On the History Channel?), my mind wandered to that most awesomest of shows from my youth: In Search Of.

I’ve spoken about it often here at the Hopper. Next to the original Battlestar Galactica series, it was probably the only thing I regularly watched on night-time teevee at that age. True, when slightly younger, me and the family would watch Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Chico and the Man, and, of course, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, on Sunday nights. Around age eleven, I suddenly became too cool for such fare. But not for In Search Of.

In fact, In Search Of was downright creepy. Also, downright awesome, if you forgive the repetition. That opening synthesizer and wah-wah theme song; the psychedelic, moody, oppressive background music; Leonard Nimoy and everything about him – voice, moustache and/or goatee, those loud 70s suits and fat ties; and best of all, the topics. The paranormal, extranormal, abnormal, anti-normal. Strange sightings, cryptids, histories mysteries, edge-of-science-stuff, vanishings, legends true, false, and middling. Every week I looked forward with goosebumped anticipation. Thank God my dad was into this, too (at least, I guess; I don’t think I had the foresight to plan out these viewings).

Each 22-minute episode focused on a single, sole topic aimed directly at the imagination of eleven-year-old boys all across America. Occasionally the show veered into the hokey, to small degrees, but it always maintained a somewhat objective scientific mien. That, coupled with the dignity Spock brought and exuded with his superhuman vocal chords, gave the show a seriousness that you just couldn’t shake. Many episodes focused on respectable “mysteries” – mysteries of literature, historical events, people and peoples of ages past.

So, scanning my memories, I tasked myself to come up with a top-ten of greatest In Search Of episodes. Now, we all know memories are leaky things, quite malleable and often possessing agendae of their own. If I err somehow, well, take it in the spirit that it’s offered: Creepy Nimoy goodness!

10. The Dogon tribe

An African tribe that somehow knows of the existence of Sirius and its smaller stellar companion – invisible to the naked eye. Though I didn’t grasp the significance back then, I somehow have never forgotten this episode.

9. Jack the Ripper

My first encounter with this serial psycho from 1880s England. The sheer violence shocked me, truth be told, I, who loved swords and sorcery and science fiction mayhem at this point. I still can’t get interested in this historical mystery due to the gore factor.

8. The Shroud of Turin

Hey, I’m currently reading a book about this! Again, my first encounter with a historical mystery. Never completely escaped my mind. Well, it did for a few decades, but lately I’ve been thinking about it!

7. Michael Rockefeller

Okay, I don’t remember seeing this as a kid. Saw it in a rerun about ten years ago, and this truly never really left my mind. Youngling of the beyond-wealthy and uber-powerful clan, he seemingly chucked all that wealth and power … to study primitive cultures as an anthropologist. However, hubris must be passed along genetically, as he ran afoul of a particularly nasty tribe (allegedly) and – disappeared without a trace. What happened to him?

6. The Amityville Horror

Vaguely remember this, and rewatched it on youtube around Halloween (you can see most In Search Of episodes on youtube). Man, was I into this back around 78 or 79. Scary stuff. Drew me like a moth to flame.

5. The Oak Island Money Pit

Buried treasure. Just beyond your grasp. Many tried to dig it up. All failed. Some died. Every ten feet down, a sign. An elaborate trap? Otherworldly engineering? Who knows? Something I’d love to. Learn more. About.

4. Amelia Earhart

In a similar vibe with Michael Rockefeller, these types of mysterious vanishings toy with my obsession buttons. Many years later I skimmed through a book about her. Lots of alternate theories of what happened to her (captured by Japs, starved on a distant island, etc), but I think she and her co-pilot just plain veered off course and crashed into the ocean. I don’t want to think of what happened after that.

3. Ogo-Pogo

A sea serpent, or rather, a lake monster like the Loch Ness critter. I recall some footage from the episode. Interesting, intriguing. What caught me most, though, was the name of the dang monster. It’s gotta be of Indian derivation, but there’s a spookiness in a million-year-old modern brachiosaur named Ogo-Pogo.

2. Bigfoot!

As every eleven-year-old boy was in the late 70s, I was completely enamored by Bigfoot. Read tons of books on the cryptid, watched anything and everything I could on the subject. This episode held my first viewing of the Gimlin-Patterson film footage, of which I have never made up my mind. I think I’m of the opinion that there’s a fifty-percent chance the creature exists. Still, though, the possibilities are so intriguing I am completely amazed and dumbfounded a decent horror movie has never been made about the beast. Aside from The Legend of Boggy Creek, of course.

1. UFO abductees

This was before the whole abduction phenomenon began in the mid-80s. So I was treated to learned about Travis Walton primarily. Some other stuff, too, but I can’t quite remember what exactly. However, I do know that this was the very first episode of In Search Of that I ever watched! And I was hooked, baby, hooked!

* * * * *

One of my favorite childhood memories was watching the Leonard Nimoy-narrated In Search Of … Each week Mr. Nimoy would go in search of something cryptic, paranormal, historically mysterious, etc.  My favorite shows were on UFOs and giant hairy hominids, my favorite subjects as a ten-year-old.  I’ve written about the show elsewhere on the blog, most notably here.

The show ran from April of 1977 until March of 82, but for me it was the second and third seasons that I watched religiously.  A gap of thirty years followed and I rediscovered the shows on youtube.  (Yes, one of the cable channels played them in the early 2000s, and I watched a handful during a stretch of unemployment.)  Now, when I suffer insomnia or have to pay bills and balance the family checkbook, I often have Leonard’s soothingly sonorous and nicotinous narrations exploring the esoteric with me on the Dell flatscreen.

Anyway, a few days ago I was surfing the web on the iPad and came across the In Search Of page on the IMDB.  I like the IMDB for the bulletin boards – you can read up a lot of interesting facts and opinions on films and shows you really love, as well as a lot of garbage.  You have to be discriminating, as in all things Wide World Web.  So I scanned the bulletin boards for In Search Of and came across a great question: what would be some topics that the show should’ve done but didn’t?  “Lost” episodes, in other words.

A lot of people contributed interesting ideas.  Not all I’d agree with, but a good, thorough list that seemed to be pretty much comprehensive.  At least, I couldn’t think of anything to add to it off the top of my head.  So here are the “lost” episodes I found most interesting, and in my fanboy head I can even hear Leonard Nimoy already exploring the mysteries that are the

Zombies

The Ark of the Covenant

Secret Societies

Spontaneous Human Combustion

The Chupacabra

Mothman

The Jersey Devil

The Attempted Assassination of John Paul II

Custer’s Last Stand

The RFK Assassination

The Philadelphia Experiment

Ambrose Bierce

The Knights Templar

The Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr

Billy the Kid

Fakirs from India

Pharaoh of the Exodus

The Great Chicago Fire

The Interrupted Journey of Betty and Barney Hill

The Black Plague

Alcatraz

The Eruption of Mount Saint Helens

The Last Days of Elvis Presley

Spring-Heeled Jack

Nicola Tesla

Charles Fort

The Lost City of Z

The Disappearance of Judge Crater

The Kecksburg UFO Incident

The Flatwoods Monster

The Book of Revelation

Now some topics, such as the last one, could not be adequately explored in a 22-minute format.  Others, such as the penultimate one, might not be meaty enough to fill 22 minutes.  But, man, I would watch an In Search Of episode of each and every one.  If nothing else but for the eerie moog synthesizer soundtrack!

* * * * *

Leonard Nimoy, R.I.P.

The Best of Star Trek

The best eleven episodes of the original series, in my humble opinion. Actually, I’m surprised I never blogged about this before. So in honor of Leonard Nimoy’s passing a few days ago, I figured I would spend a little bit of time on this.

When I was a kid, probably around nine, ten, eleven, I loved Star Trek. This was the era of its syndication, and I saw all the episodes in the mid-to-late Seventies. I remember watching it ritualistically on my Grandmother’s furniture-sized television set summer Sundays at 6, though it must have been on at other times for me to have seen them all back then. Now, I didn’t have the toys or the dolls, er, action figures, though two of my good friends did, and we played with them often. I had a couple of the novelizations, and stealthily read them at night in the dark with a flashlight in my top bunk bed. Watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture in the sweltering July heat on Cable TV was the highlight of my twelfth summer.

Aside from the movies, I didn’t really watch any Star Trek for the next ten or fifteen years. I got into the habit of watching The Next Generation on its Sunday late-night run for about a year; it had a good feel to end the weekend on, but I never took to it the way I did the original series. Ten years ago, when my wife was nursing Little One, she found an obscure channel that aired the old episodes at 3 am that made the feedings go by quickly, and we watched a bunch together. I also remember watching some episodes during my workouts while unemployed around the spring of 2001. But that really was it.

Until I noticed, MeTV, a retro station we just got for switching to FIOS, had been running an episode every Saturday night. We DVR them and watch them every now and then. With Leonard’s death, I watched “Arena,” “The Squire of Gothos,” “The Return of the Archons,” and “Amok Time” this past weekend with the girls. Very bittersweet.

So … in a kinda Best-Of order, here are my favorites episodes from the original series:


“Devil in the Dark”

The Horta, a blob-like animal (natch), scared the living daylights off me as a kid. Don’t think I watched it past the teaser the first time around. Once I was courageous enough to watch the whole thing, I thoroughly enjoyed the unfolding mystery of the weird deaths on Janus IV.


“The Galileo Seven”

Mr. Spoke and six others marooned in a shuttle craft on a hostile planet – hostile because giant cavemen are picking them off one by one. My absolute favorite as a kid. For some reason I thought it was a planet of Sasquatches. Recently re-watched it as an adult and saw they were more like very tall, very portly, very angry Neanderthals.


“Arena”

Kirk hand-to-claw combat with the lizard Gorn! My second-favorite episode of all time. Seeing it recently made me appreciate all that much more that strong participatory imagination of the young child. Because now the Gorn looked so fake – and the combat scenes so cornball – I could hardly get into the story. Regardless, the story is, like most of the early episodes, well-written, suspenseful, and thought-provoking.


“Operation: Annihilate!”

Flying pizzas! These things weirded me out as a kid. And when one of them attaches itself to Spock, well, I don’t think I was able to finish watching it way back then. Did so, though, probably as a courageous ten or eleven-year-old. If I remember correctly, the noise those pancakes made my flesh crawl.


“Return of the Archons”

Creeeepy! The Lawgivers with their hoods and hollow tubes, what they do to Sulu, how they keep the population in weird drugged slo-mo happiness, followed quickly by the Red Hour … surprised it didn’t give little me nightmares. It certainly kept me up at nights.


“The Changeling”

Nomad! That robot-probe-whatever thingie simultaneously intrigued and repulsed me. Enjoyed the whole arc of the episode, with Kirk and crew figuring out what it was and then how to foil it. Haven’t seen it in decades, so would be very interested with a contemporary viewing. 


“The Apple”

Pre-tween me loved, loved, loved the Dragon Vaal – and once we saw those radio receivers that look suspiciously like nails driven into the native’s heads, right smack dab behind their ears, well, that just cinched it for me.


“Mirror, Mirror”

This one definitely freaked out little me. This is where a transporter malfunction deposits Kirk and his landing party into a parallel-universe Enterprise where good is evil and evil is good. Spock’s goatee particularly unnerved me, as did Chekhov’s torture scene.


“Spectre of the Gun”

This is the one where Kirk, Spock, McCoy, et. al., are forced to relive the gunfight at O.K. Corral. Like the weird surreality of it, particularly the sweaty Bones going through the Vulcan mind-meld. Need to see this one again as an adult.


“The Cloud Minders”

Liked the city in the clouds concept back then. Remember the worker’s death as he falls off the ledge (or maybe he’s thrown, dunno) and it takes a real long time for him to eventually hit the ground as he slowly shrinks in size. The whole gas-drives-the-workers violent thing was neat, too, if perhaps a bit simplistic to adult minds.


“The Immunity Syndrome”

Amoebas in space! Trying to eat the Enterprise! Fascinated me to no end as a kid – but I haven’t seen it in over 30 years. Waiting for MeTV to show it so I can see what effect it has on adult me.


The original series ran for 79 episodes from September 1966 until June 1969. Then, in syndication, forever. Though some episodes, particularly and notoriously third season episodes (“Spock’s Brain”, we’re talking about you!), are not, shall we say, as masterfully crafted as the better ones, for me there honestly isn’t such a thing as a bad ST:TOS show.

Though it’s quite fun to watch ’em with a bunch of drunken college buddies with the volume off, trying to be as off-color and scatological as humanly possible …

Joan Rivers

Uh, not really a big fan of hers.  Some things she said made me laugh.  Some things not so much so.  Some of her social positions turned me off, and I don’t have a fashion bone in my body, so I can’t speak to all that red carpet and fashion police stuff.  But her death today was very tragic.  81 is still kinda young, especially when you have the energy of someone thirty or forty years younger.

But my wife is a huge fan.  Huuuuuuuge.  Met and chatted with Joan once on the streets of New York.  Watched all her shows religiously, the reality shows, the E! shows, the QVC stuff.  My wife’s fantasy job – which she’d readily admit to – would be Joan’s personal assistant.  A strong second-place would be national VP of sales for her jewelry line.

Anyway, via my wife, I did see and hear a lot of her and I appreciated her guts.  A very, very, very rare public figue it is indeed, today, not to be intimidated by political correctness.  Her humor was an acquired taste, and (at least to me) failed more than it scored.  But when she did say something funny, often about someone in the public eye we’re not allowed to poke fun at, it was hilarious.  I also read somewhere that one recent year she donated six times more to stupid party candidates than evil party candidates, so that’s something.  But even more noteworthy was her business / work ethic – something tremendous and exceptional and should be taught to our children.  My wife plans on doing so.

Rest in peace.

Ring of Inanity

Last night, surrounded by my books, words and sentences, paragraphs and chapters on the sublime mysteries of infinity, of salvation through Christ, of the hard practicalities of why the South lost the Civil War, reading a little of this, a little of that, pondering these deep subjects –

Or at least trying to.

The wife was watching Rocky IV (not her fault; I found it channel surfing earlier in the night), and all I could think about was –

Who would win in a fight, Clubber Lang or Ivan Drago?

Terminus

OK, Walking Dead, I am done with you.  You jumped the shark Sunday night.

Nine-year-old blond girl murders her seven-year-old blond sister.

Ergo, forty-five-year-old woman murders nine-year-old blond girl.

Really?

Really?

Yes, you’ve been desensitizing me to extreme violence for three years now.  Yes, I know they’re “undead,” but how many times can one see a human being’s skull punctured and shattered by bullets, knives, hammers, boots and not be affected on some level, even a subconscious one? 

How long can we wallow in man’s inhumanity to man with no glimpse of hope or transcendence before we are incapable of feeling hope or seeking transcendence?

Over four seasons, forty-plus episodes, forty or fifty characters have come and gone, and only once or twice do we see one – one! – character thumb a Bible verse.  No one prays.  No one calls on Jesus Christ.  No one calls on God.

It’s long been a pet theory of mine that Walking Dead is basically a show about hell.  All the characters have died and wind up in hell without a memory of their past earthly life, and are now paying for their willing sins.  There is no morality in their world save for a utilitarian, dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest might-makes-right type. 

But as I become firmly entrenched in middle age, with, perhaps, more years behind me than ahead of me, I become convinced, stronger and stronger every day, that one has to make best use of one’s hours remaining.  It’s not necessarily a religious argument.  It’s a purely practical one.  You gotta guard what enters into your mind, what passes through those gates of eyes and ears, because, like food you ingest and your body uses to build itself up, that stuff entering your mind becomes a part of you.  Consciously, subconsciously, whatever.  Consider this very, very profound thought: You can’t unsee something.

So, Walking Dead, though you initially provided some thrills, some interesting characters, some food-for-thought, you’ve jumped the shark with the endless and incessant gore porn, nihilism, and shock for shock’s sake. 

Murdering a nine-year-old girl.

Goodbye. 

Funniest Show on Teevee Now

Is Impractical Jokers. Hands down, without a doubt.

Proof?

My tears of laughter.

Four high school pals from Staten Island – with the accents to prove it – compete against each to other to see who can make it through some of the mostly uncomfortable, occasionally humiliating, always hilarious “challenges” interacting with the general public. Like a demented Candid Camera, each has to do or say what the other three – hidden from the scene – tell him through an earpiece. If he refuses to obey, or doesn’t get a desired reaction from the unwitting public participant, he loses. At the end of each show the loser is punished – and it’s often the most uncomfortable, humiliating, and hilarious scene of the show.

Three minutes in my face is soaked by the tears running down my face. I wipe it off during the commercials so by the end of the show I have to change my shirt. Literally. I haven’t laughed so hard in … oh … at least six or seven years (last time was a drunken New Years Eve where I happened to have the rare privilege of hanging out with two of my good friends who are hardly ever in the same spot at the same time). In fact, I can count on laughing so hard during Impractical Jokers that I actually can’t breathe at least once per episode.

Case in point:



My wife looks at me incredulously, but – I’ve caught her laughing, too, and I think she’s slowly starting to see things my way here.

The guys – Joe, Q, Murr and Sal – are part of a comedy troupe call The Tenderloins. This past Saturday afternoon I found 33 videos of theirs on youtube and watched Every. Single. One. Of. Them. At least half made me laugh out loud in the room by myself, and two or three brought tears to my eyes like Impractical Jokers does. Funny, funny, funny stuff, in the best sense of the word.

Most of the time the biggest laughs come not from the awkward situations and genuine humor that results but from the reactions of the three guys watching from a safe location. Sal in particular has a habit of falling over because he laughs so uncontrollably hard. How can you, the viewer, not chuckle at that? It’s contagious!

I am a fan. I look forward to the show. I DVR it. Pathetic or cool? I’m going with cool. It’s a great show and I’m addicted.

Go – watch it!

Tube Action

Last night the wife, suffering from severe allergic reactions to the kilotons of tree pollen smog that envelops the upper part of my state this month, went to bed very early. This left me, at 8 pm, with nothing to do. Rather, a desire to do nothing.

Didn’t want to read; already put away nearly sixty pages in my PJF paperback, and didn’t feel like cracking the A-bomb tome. What to do, what to do?

Then it dawned on me: the DVR player!

Once or twice a month I scroll through the channel guide at length, recording a relatively rare this and that. Since January, I’ve accumulated about ten or twelve movies and documentaries that seem to hold some interest for me. What better time than now, I thought, with three uninterrupted hours, to watch a couple and free up some space on the old DVR?

First thing I watched was The Red Badge of Courage, a black-and-white 1951 cinematic treatment of the Stephen Crane classic. Directed by the legendary John Huston. Originally, from what I’ve read, it clocked in at two hours and contained some of Huston’s greatest pyrotechnical treatments of war. He even hinted that it may have been his greatest accomplishment. However, skirmishing between the famed director and studio mogul Samuel Goldwyn (I think it was him), along with some negative prescreening audience reactions, led to the studio putting a hatchet to the film, editing it down to 75 minutes, and inserting narration taken straight from the Crane novel.

All in all, I still liked it. I have a inkling that Huston’s original version would have become as classic as the source material. But I still liked the studio version. The warfare seemed authentic, the acting was passable, the writing decent enough. Two scenes stand out: the hair-raising death of the “Tall Soldier,” Jim Conklin, thirty-five minutes in, and some heartful banter between a victorious Union soldier and a captured Reb. I’d grade the flick a solid B-plus, possibly an A-minus.

Then I watched a Mythbusters episode. About ten years ago, when it first came out, the wife and I (me particularly) were especially enamored with the show. But, though it never jumped the shark before, we just kinda started watching other things.

Anyway, this episode concerned whether Jimmy Hoffa’s body might be at the ten-yard line of Giants Stadium. Since they couldn’t dig up the field, they did the next best thing: they buried a pig carcass beneath the concrete sidewalk by their warehouse. Waited a certain amount of time, then used one of those ground-MRI thingies to search for signs of the dead pig. Interesting but inconclusive (and slightly gross-out) stuff.

There was also a test about Jamie allowing himself to be bit by a daddy longlegs (which didn’t look like the daddy longlegs in my childhood basement at all) to test its poison potency. Needless to say, I deleted the episode before it got to this point.

My final viewing of the night was some special called “Myths and Monsters of Modern America.” I think. Don’t remember the title and haven’t seen it before or since I DVR’d it. Anyway – jackpot! Real creepy stuff.

The first thirty minutes focused on this dude who allegedly shot a sasquatch, then buried it (good move, Fish Kid!). When he was convinced by bigfoot investigators to go back and prove it, the ground had frozen and snow covered. What I found creepy, though, was the backstory of one of the main investigators.

Seems that when this guy was a teenager, mid-eighties, he and a buddy would go hiking deep into the dark woods. They’d make camp and head back home the next day. Well, this time, sitting around the campfire, pitch blackness all about them, they hear a crashing thud. Elk? Moose? It’s quiet, and they’re a bit unnerved. Then a large rock is lobbed into their small camp and lands a few feet away. Now they’re more than a bit unnerved. Is their a psycho hiker out there? Suddenly a second large rock is heaved at them. Terrified, they high-tail it out of there, heading downhill on a small path. This guy remembers he has a gun in his backpack. Stops to take it out and looks over his shoulder –

And sees a dark, hulking humanoid form silhouetted against the nighttime sky, a few yards behind him.

The man says he never knew fear – heart-stopping, time-stopping fear – until that moment.

Needless to say, the re-enactment was dead-on. None of the silly CGI stuff. This was spooky!

Unfortunately for me, it was time to go to bed.

Fortunately for me, I live in a safe, locked house, miles away from any suspected Sasquatch habitats.

Unfortunately for me, I had a crazy bad nightmare a few hours later.

More on that, maybe, tomorrow …

Someone is Killing the Sweathogs!

Was what my wife yelled out, last night, when I told her of the death of the actor who played Horshack. This, coupled with the death of the actor who played Epstein this past January, caused the outburst.

As a wee youngling barely able to hop up on the blue couches that elled our living room in the mid-seventies, I vividly recall watching Welcome Back Kotter with my family, amongst fare such as Chico and the Man, Happy Days, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Of the sweathogs show I recall none of the plots, just the vague general personalities of the quartet of high school kids, Groucho Marx their teacher, Groucho’s hippie-ish wife. I remember the principal, a gnarled, gnurley grump, made me very nervous.

Boom-Boom beware! You could be next!

Unfair

Let’s say the NCAA decides that instead of all these football bowl game thingies, they’re gonna have something like a March Madness. All the top teams from the various collegiate conferences will go into the sixty-four bye tournament where after a month you’ll have the championship game of college football. Call it the Amateur Bowl, because we’re talking about kids under 21 playing a non-professional sport.

Kinda like the Olympics, right?

Now, let’s also say that the NCAA does this for a whole bunch of years to wild success. The college championship game, this Amateur Bowl, is televised to record numbers of folks. But in an effort to surpass what they think is possible, they decide to change the rules a bit.

For this year, the NCAA is going to allow the New York Giants and the New England Patriots football teams to compete in the college tournament. That’s right, Eli and Tom Coughlin and Tom Brady and Belicheck will be participants in the 2012 Amateur Bowl.

Why not? It’s football, right?

My question is, what’re the Las Vegas odds that the college championship game will be between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots?

How many times out of a hundred will those teams be playing in the final game? I mean, you have to allow for upsets an all, but my gut tells me that 96 or 97 times out of a hundred, the college championship game will be played between the Giants and Pats if you allow the Giants and Pats to play among a field of 62 college teams.

Know where I’m going with this?

Watching the Olympics these past ten days, I’m disgusted with the fact that certain sports (I’m talking to you, Tennis and Basketball) allow professional athletes to compete with earnest amateur competitors. I mean really: did you see the American basketball team slam dunkin’ against the Latvians? Really? Did we really expect no one but the Williams sisters would be in the female tennis finals? Really?

Is this what the Olympic spirit is all about?

Really?


Note 1: Me wife is sick of me spewing this message; I’m kind of a one-note-Johnny here, so I’m forbidden from mentioning this anymore in my home. But I have a blog, dammit! I do! So I shake my fist at the sky and say, it ain’t right, I tells ya, it ain’t right!

Note 2: Unfair. That’s a loaded word, isn’t it? Fairness in the public discussion nowadays takes on two dimensions – equality of opportunity and equality of results. Obviously, talkin’ sports, we’re talkin’ equality of opportunity. And I just don’t see it between the tattooed behemoths of the NBA steamrolling over the Svens from Sweden or the Fabiens of France.

Person of Interest

Ten Things I Learned Watching Last Night’s Person of Interest:


1. Pharmaceutical companies are generally EEEEEEEvil.

2. Pharmaceutical companies usually have hired killers on the payroll.

3. Entrepreneurs like to encourage their children to be as EEEEEEEvil as they are, especially once they take over the company.

4. A paperclip can stealthily unlock handcuffs in less than thirty seconds.

5. Potassium chloride (what the government uses for lethal injection executions) works instantaneously, especially on 6-foot 220-pound men.

6. Most pharmaceutical company assassins and CEOs are EEEEEEEvil to the very end.

7. Pharmaceutical companies think it’s okay to risk 30,000 lives for a half-billion dollars.

8. You can fire a gun several times out the blown out rear window of your limousine and still drive down a New York city street without crashing or killing a pedestrian.

9. Social security and cell phone numbers can predict whether you will be killed, as long as it goes through a computer that can do some math.

10. Most EEEEEEEvil pharmaceutical companies have corrupt police commissioners in their pocket.


Okay. Despite the list, Person of Interest is okay. I like the surveillance gizmos, I like the quirky characterizations and somewhat understated acting. The premise is decent, if you suspend disbelief and don’t worry too much about Number 9 above. There’s just something about it that’s a little off, something that I predict will cause it not to be renewed for a second season. Or, if it is, only with some type of drastic overhaul.

What the list above indicates, though, is LAZY LIBERAL WRITING on behalf of the “creative” people behind the show. While watching it with the wife, I pondered, “Wouldn’t it be truly surprising if a bunch of CEOs were targeted by, say, a rogue killer from Greenpeace?” Think about it. Would never happen on primetime teeveee.

Unless the rogue killer from Greenpeace suddenly found Jesus or something.