Thursday, December 9, 2004

What? No Thundarr the Barbarian?

TV Land and TV Guide have teamed for five hour-long specials this week that countdown The 100 Most Memorable TV Moments. Like all these lists, the picks are arguable, especially when one considers the many ways to define "memorable" and the simple vagaries of personal experience. Many aren't memorable to me because I never saw them in the first place.

The specials are well-produced and someone deserves a lot of credit, if only for obtaining so many "talking head" interviews to comment on and describe the memorable moments. There are a lot of nice sleight-of-hand moves in evidence. In many cases, they were unable to obtain (or unwilling to pay for) actual footage of the memorable moments in question. So they switch between a lot of different folks discussing it and intercut still photos...and in many cases, you barely notice that they didn't actually show you the moment. I'll bet a lot of people will watch these specials and think they saw footage that wasn't there.

Tonight's show counted down #21-40 with things like Bill Clinton playing sax on The Arsenio Hall Show, Henry Blake's death on M*A*S*H, Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl, Hank Aaron's home run record and Eddie Murphy doing James Brown on Saturday Night Live. In fact, if you want to see the whole list, they have it up on their website. Here's #81-100. Here's #61-80. Here's #60-41. And here's #40-21.

They're counting down #1-20 on the installment tomorrow night and to keep America in suspense, they haven't posted or released that list yet. However, it's hidden on the website without any active links to it, which means that you can read it if you know where to look. All five hours rerun a couple times on Saturday.

• Posted at 10:28 PM · LINK

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam...

Sounds like a joke but it's true: To tie in with the new Monty Python musical, Spamalot, the Hormel company is putting out a special "golden honey grail" can of Spam. It comes out in February — when the show will be opening on Broadway — and they say it'll be available just in New York. I have a feeling this will be a collectible only, which is to say no one will actually open the can and consume its contents. Which if you must buy a can of Spam is always a good idea.

Here's a press release about this monumental event. Here's an announcement about the pre-Broadway pre-cast album of the show, which sounds like a CD of the demos Eric Idle recorded. And here's a link to the official website for the show, which is full of all sorts of silliness. If you just load the site and listen, you can hear an awful lot of the score. [Thanks to Roger Ash for the tip.]

• Posted at 7:50 PM · LINK

Clark Can't

We're thinking good thoughts this evening for Dick Clark, who earlier this week, suffered what is being described as a "mild stroke." I worked for Dick on a few occasions and apart from his well-known aversion to paying high salaries, I liked him tremendously.

I can't help think about a problem that Dick's crew and his network may be discussing at the moment. As everyone knows, a fixture of every December 31/January 1 transition is the annual Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve special, with Dick reporting from a rooftop in Times Square. What some folks may not know is that the rest of the show — everything except Dick's live cut-ins — is recorded some time before. It's tough to book top musical acts on New Year's Eve, especially for the kind of money Dick Clark Productions tends to offer.

I dunno when they did this year's but back when I worked for Dick, the music portions were all taped in October with the hosts saying, "And now, let's go to Dick Clark in Times Square!" This year, the broadcast takes the form of two programs — one before and one after your local 11:30 newscast — for a total of three hours and thirty minutes. One suspects they've taped all the music and a lot of footage that mentions cutting to Dick in New York. One also suspects that even if Mr. Clark makes a rapid recovery, it would not be a good idea for him to fly to New York, battle New Year's Eve crowds and spend several hours atop a building in what may be pretty cold weather. So someone is at the very least thinking about an alternate Times Square correspondent and figuring out how they can re-edit what is already taped to accommodate a change. Dick might still pull himself together in time, but they're probably scrambling to pull together a Plan B. Just in case.

• Posted at 12:14 AM · LINK