Important public service announcement
We’ve just started watching Season Four of Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse’s cleverly titled sketch comedy program Harry and Paul, which is very good. And, ummm…you probably can’t get it. So by way of apology, please accept this YouTube of my all-time favorite Enfield short (from a previous series): Women, Know Your Limits!
I laughed until kittens came out of my nose.
You can watch other videos from that series (Harry Enfield and Chums from the Nineties) on its own YouTube channel (and if you click around from there, you can spend a whole evening sampling the Beeb). Oh, and check out Armstrong and Miller — another good sketch comedy program coming out of the UK.
Anybody doing sketch comedy in the States any more?
November 26, 2012 — 11:29 pm
Comments: 18
Awww…
Dick “Danger, Will Robinson” Tufeld, dead at 85. Died watching the NFL playoffs (football is bad for you, m’kay). He was preceded in 2009 by Bob May, the little dude who actually wore the suit (it was hard to get out of the suit and he was a smoker, so smoke would be seen drifting out of the seams of the robot at breaktime).
And before them, Jonathan Harris, my hero. Born in the Bronx to Russian immigrant parents. When he got the theater bug, he watched British B movies for weeks straight until it thoroughly effed up his accent.
Sometimes, I poke Uncle B in the ribs until he says, “Oh, the pain!”
January 25, 2012 — 9:31 pm
Comments: 17
So, Chelsea Clinton made her TV debut last night
The best part of Chelsea Clinton’s TV performance on MSNBC last night was this savage review in the Washington Post today. See, this is what happens when you forcibly hold journalists at arms length for twenty years: they bust out nasty.
I love a mean review. Of anything. A professional word guy being savagely rude about someone else’s work somehow scratches an itch for me. This is the money quote everyone’s running with:
Either we’re spoiled by TV’s unlimited population of giant personalities or this woman is one of the most boring people of her era.
Ow. Only…speaking as someone with crippling stage fright, I have a strong suspicion what we’re really looking at is a serious case of Xanax Face.
December 13, 2011 — 8:48 pm
Comments: 50
This will not end well
You know the people who are saying Charlie Sheen might actually do better without his sitcom gig, now that he’s internet famous? Yeah, I entertained the thought, until I saw that last video.
Dude looks like shit.
Old. And sick. And beat-down.
And crazy, of course. The crazy goes without saying. You can be as balls-out crazy as you like, but if you want to hang on to your celebrity status, you simply cannot look bad.
March 8, 2011 — 11:48 pm
Comments: 36
DEFUND!!!
NPR chief executive Vivian Schiller is defending the firing of news analyst Juan Williams after his comments on the Fox News Channel, saying his feelings about Muslims are between him and “his psychiatrist or his publicist.”
The “psychiatrist” part of that smirking little Vivian Schiller remark has gotten a lot of attention, but I think the “publicist” part is full of burn, too. As in — if you say you’re scared of motherfucking muslims on the motherfucking plane, you’re either crazy, or you’re just doing it for attention.
What? I know, I know…the logo is for PBS, and Juan Williams got booted from NPR. The PBS logo was simply funner to play with. Anyhow, fuck it. Defund the lot — PBS, NPR. CPB, while we’re at it. That’s a start.
Yes, yes…there’s merchandise. I whipped up a batch hours ago, but Zazzle is so constipated, none of it is showing up yet. Well, there’s a bumpersticker.
But remember — none of this hilarity will be possible unless we win AND WIN HUGE next week! Forget the Democrats, it’s got to be big enough to scare the shit out of Republicans, or they’ll all sink back into the warm, comfy slops together.
October 26, 2010 — 11:27 pm
Comments: 10
It’s not easy being green
Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. But we won’t see the Incredible Sulk for another couple of weeks.
For those too young to remember — once upon a time, if you pissed off Bill Bixby, Lou Ferrigno turned green and ruined his trousers.
October 19, 2010 — 10:39 pm
Comments: 13
A faceful of hot, wet ugly
I know, I know — all the cool kids have blogged this PSA already.
It’s an eco fantasy snuff film, where true believers calmly murder those not willing to cut energy consumption by ten percent. And it’s an extraordinarily ugly piece of work. That’s my favorite bit up there — right at the end, when they blow up Gillian Anderson and her eyeballs slowly squee down the glass.
The blowback was instant and HUGE and not all from the right. They’ve pulled it down already. Repeatedly. As of now this copy is still working and, if all else fails, I’ve downloaded the .flv (drop me a line if you want it — my blog uploader choked on it).
I think I can explain where this thing comes from, though. I mean, besides scary evil eco-psychosis. Raw, ugly and in your face is a very common style of charity and public service advertising in the UK.
There was that anti-smoking TV ad I found so hard to watch; dragging a guy down the steps and out the building by a giant fish-hook stuck in his face (“hooked” on cigarettes, uh-huh uh-huh). Or the man slumped bleeding in the driver’s seat while his wife screams his name down the phone (cell phones distract drivers, see?).
Because of my IP, I even get British adverts while surfing my good old true-blue American web sites. Most common are the tragic children; the perennial starving African babies, the tight close-up of an Asian child with cleft palate, the little girl with the stumps for legs. Picture of sad-eyed child with horrible parental insults superimposed in text. Scared teenager on the streets with shadowy figures closing in. Oh, and the animal charities — ye gods! All those filthy one-eyed puppies and mangy bears.
I’m sure the advertising agencies would say that shocking imagery is real and we should be forced to confront it — and that awful images get the desired response. But there are two huge disadvantages to this approach.
The first is for me, a consumer of media. It makes my world a relentlessly horrible place; a place of perpetual emergencies and nagging ugliness. It is, in a word, a downer.
And the second flows from the first: I get jaded. To shock me, agencies have to up the ante continually. Dream up more and more horrible imagery. This isn’t the first time green campaigns have evoked jihadi/September 11 imagery to sell the urgency of their cause. To the people who made the “No Pressure” video, this seemed like a perfectly natural next-step progression in the ratcheting up of edginess.
But to all of you who aren’t exposed to this ugly shit all day, it was like, WHAT THE FUCK IS THE MATTER WITH THOSE PEOPLE?!
October 1, 2010 — 8:35 pm
Comments: 52
Happy birthday, bucket o’ suck
The first episode of The Flintstones aired fifty years ago on this day. Also, that’s Stony Curtis! Who is dead! Plus, I saw a guy walking down the street today wearing a Quick Draw McGraw t-shirt, no lie.
That’s enough synchronicity to make your eyes bleed.
And speaking of things that make your eyes bleed — Hanna-Barbera Cartoons!
I once worked for a man who loved H-B cartoons for the same reason I hate them — they were forever finding new and innovative ways to be cheap-ass. Like, when Barney’s talking the camera’s on Fred and when Fred is talking the camera’s on Barney so they don’t have to pay for so much of that gosh-darned moving mouth animation.
The downside? Making your viewers stare at a big ugly drawing of a head that doesn’t do anything but blink occasionally.
These guys had hundreds of titles. I mentally divide Hanna-Barbera cartoons into the following categories:
The Early Suck: the three or so decades from Huckleberry Hound through to Josie and the Pussycats, inclusive of the whole Scooby Doo oeuvre.
The Doesn’t Actually Suck: which includes most of their adventure cartoons of the same era. Jonny Quest, Birdman and the Galaxy Trio, The Herculoids, the Fantastic Four. Character design by the excellent comic artist Alex Toth and non-comedy storylines make the difference.
The Later Suck: the Eighties were full of cartoons (from many studios) that had slick production values but still somehow managed to suck even harder than Magilla Gorilla. The Smurfs, Pac Man, Scrappy Doo, Snorks. There was a plague of “familiar cartoon characters as babies” shows, too. The Flintstone Kids, A Pup Named Scooby Doo. There’s something peculiarly horrible and soulless about this era.
The Aren’t Really H-B Cartoons cartoons: Turner bought the Hanna-Barbera studio and library in the early Nineties and launched the Cartoon Network to showcase them. H-B studios then encouraged in-house staff to pitch cartoon ideas, which were shown as World Premiere Toons. This gave rise to several excellent cartoons: Dexter’s Laboratory, Cow and Chicken, I Am Weasel, The Powerpuff Girls. You might think of them as HBINOs.
I must say, I’m awfully tempted to buy the Hanna-Barbera Cartoon Sound Efx collection, but I just can’t work out how to sync up life events with the appropriate sound effect.
September 30, 2010 — 10:33 pm
Comments: 55
Clever premise, stupid premise
Into cartoons? Oh yes. And thanks to an art department gig that put a TV at my desk, I got a huge dose of daytime television, right through the Eighties and Nineties.
My goodness, how most of it sucked.
I loved the premise for Thundercats, though. This planet of martial-artist-cat-people blows up, and everyone evacuates by space ship. Except, only one ship makes it out, and it’s the ship with the royalty on it — including the boy-cat who’s destined to be king.
Finally, the ship lands on a planet (Earth, as it happens), and it turns out their suspended animation thingie was gefukt. They’ve been asleep, but they’re decades older. Including the king, who is now unimaginably huge, powerful and in charge…and still has the mind of a seven-year-old.
So the others have to grow him up, without pissing him off too much. Must have been fantastically appealing to seven-year-olds who weren’t impossibly powerful.
On the other hand, there was Captain Planet. Brainchild of Ted Turner, with voice talent from every famous person who ever lived and surely one of the dumbest cartoons EVARRR.
See, there are these five children with power rings: an African boy in tune with the earth, a Malaysian girl with a deep understanding of the ocean, a South American Indian shaman boy with the ability to communicate with animals telepathically, a Russian girl computer genius, and an American boy whose special ability is hitting on the girls and being an irritating retard.
I’m loving this already.
Together, they can summon this warty superhero guy of indeterminate powers, to fight pollution. His one vulnerability? Pollution.
Oh, but the best bit is the cartoon’s complete and utter fail as propaganda. The villains aren’t greedy capitalist bastards whose money-grubbing activities cause environmental damage — an eco-villain with some kind of real-world meaning. No, the bad guys pollute for the sake of polluting. It’s their whole deal, no reason given. Hey, let’s pour shit in the ocean, ha ha ha!
It never ceases to astonish, how large pools of money and talent can come together and make infinite suck.
July 13, 2010 — 10:34 pm
Comments: 36
Every 16th Century farmhouse…
…needs a 40″ widescreen TV.
Okay, this isn’t quite the act of aesthetic vandalism it looks. Instead of having a big glommy tube television perched like a shrine in the focal point of the room, this will fold flat against the wall when we aren’t watching it. And…display a slideshow of classic Tudor portraits, or some shit.
And it isn’t quite the act of devil-may-care profligacy it looks, either. Uncle B’s been saving for quite some time. It’s amazing the sweet deals you can get in the teeth of a global financial meltdown!
Me, I played this one just right. “A widescreen TV?” I yawned, languidly flashing a full set of gleaming weaselfangs, “oh, I guess that would be okay. I guess.”
Hahaha! Stoopit badger! I’m a Namerican! The moment he hit the ON switch, I *pwned* that sucker. My eyeballs stuck to that big boy like duct tape sticks to duct tape. Eet ees so verra verra beeeg and shiiiiiiny!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to watch the latest installment of CSI:Pulaski. Or the Wheelbarrow Channel. Or…whatever. Does it fucking matter?
December 22, 2008 — 9:22 pm
Comments: 25