Many a reader of this site has suggested I mention the following. In the "Weird Al" Yankovic video to which I linked early this morn, the guy in the car at the end is Greg Kihn, who wrote and performed the original song being parodied. It was called "(Our Love's In) Jeopardy." Curt Alliaume suggests this may have been the first time a musician appeared in a video that parodied his song.
Just looked at the other networks. Fox is carrying the Presidential Address live at 8:00 PM (Eastern Time) and has allotted twenty minutes for it. My TiVo guide for the New York Fox affiliate, WNYW, has Prison Break starting at 8:20, 24 starting at 9:20, Fox 5 News at 10 starting at 10:20, a Seinfeld rerun at 11:20...then they have a very odd thing listed: A Simpsons episode starting at 11:50 PM. What's odd about that? It's listed as a ten-minute episode. Reruns of That '70s Show follow at Midnight and 12:30 AM.
Then we go over to KTTV, which is the Los Angeles Fox outlet. They have the Presidential Address from 5:00 to 5:20, followed by a ten-minute episode of King of the Hill. Then everything else after runs its usual length and starts on the hour or half-hour.
Are they really chopping an old Simpsons episode and a rerun of King of the Hill down to ten minutes apiece? Or do they just figure to join them in progress? Bizarre either way.
ABC's Monday night schedule, at least on my TiVo, shows no sign of including Bush's speech.
Neither does CBS's. The oddity here is that Two and a Half Men runs 31 minutes and then the show that follows — The New Adventures of Old Christine — is a 29-minute show starting at 9:31. I wish they'd stop doing this.
My TiVo schedule has been updated to reflect the odd running times of Deal or No Deal tomorrow night. Thanks to my satellite, I get both the East Coast and West Coast feeds. The East Coast feed of the show starts at 5:25 PM (Pacific Time) and runs one hour and 35 minutes. The West Coast feed starts at 8:00 PM and runs for two hours. Just to compare, I've set up to record both.
This may seem like a trivial matter to some of you but I really think the future of television will have a lot to do with the accurate delivery of programming to our video recorders or home media centers, including the ability to adjust for breaking news, live shows that run long, etc. With Internet connectivity, this should be quite possible and the folks who deliver our shows to us are going to have to have a quick response time to changes. Nice to see us moving in that direction.
Tuesday morning in the wee small hours, Fox Movie Channel is airing the 1970 movie, Myra Breckenridge, starring Raquel Welch and Rex Reed as each other, and John Houston and Mae West trying to see which of them can do a better job of making you forget the good things they were once involved with. It's not Skidoo...but it's close.
The film is a fascinating relic of a period in the movie industry when the folks in charge were largely clueless about what they should be making in order to compete with television. A few years earlier, the consensus in some quarters had been that the only thing movies could offer than you couldn't get on the small screen was the big screen. Some predicted that soon, every film would be on the grand scale of Ben-Hur or Cleopatra and that instead of making a lot of small-to-medium budget movies each year, the majors would collectively produce perhaps a dozen huge-budget flicks. As some of those huge-budget flicks flopped, execs learned the danger of putting all of one's eggs in a lone basket and began pondering how else they might draw viewers from their homes and into theaters.
The other obvious thing movies could offer than TV couldn't was more adult fare but the major studios were too conservative to follow that line of thinking to its logical conclusion. As a result, we had this period when they were making half-assed, clumsy attempts to be adult without offending the masses. At the same time, Newsweek told them there was this "youth movement" on in the country — it may have had something to do with some war in Asia at the time — and since teens and young adults go on dates (i.e., buy movie tickets), there was this massive attempt to pander to them, mostly made by people who hadn't a clue how to do that. That's how we got things like Skidoo and The Strawberry Statement and Vanishing Point and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Some were good, some weren't but they all gave off these odd pheromones of someone clumsily trying to appeal to an audience they didn't understand.
I dunno what they thought the audience was for Myra Breckenridge but it turned out to be people who wanted to go laugh at how awful a movie could be. The reviews were dreadful and it didn't help matters that Rex Reed wrote a lengthy article for Playboy that soundly trashed the writer-director as incompetent and unable to even shoot the movie he'd set out to make. (As opposed to Skidoo where, I gather, Otto Preminger made exactly the movie he envisioned and it still didn't make a lick of sense.)
To see Myra Breckenridge is to feel sorry for everyone involved. Mae West sure didn't deserve that as her next-to-last movie (didn't deserve her last one, Sextette, either but there she mostly had herself to blame). I am not suggesting you watch this and I'm not even including a link to buy the DVD because you definitely don't want to do that. But you should know that it's there, if only so you can step gingerly around it.
I discovered Dr. Demento's radio show around 1972, shortly after he first began broadcasting in that identity. It was a regular Sunday night ritual for a long time and I even rigged up a device to tape him when I couldn't listen live. His show then was a cornucopia (that's the first time I've used that word on this weblog) of rare and funny "novelty records" by the likes of Spike Jones, Stan Freberg, Allan Sherman and a lot of folks I hadn't previously heard of. Later on, my interest petered out as he began playing what I felt were too many homemade and garage recordings by amateurs. It was great that he was giving these folks some exposure but, well, you know...not one of them was Spike, Stan or Allan. Still later, the Good Doctor seems to have come to his senses and the pendulum swung back to a nice mix of new and old and I now give a listen whenever I can.
What prompted so many musicians to create songs for Dr. Demento to play was that he made a star out of one guy who submitted a tape — "Weird Al" Yankovic. He first played one of Al's homemade efforts around '76 and then a few years later, "My Bologna" (a parody of The Knack's "My Sharona") became a frequent entry on the Demento Funny Five. "Weird Al" became a genuine recording artist/star and the guy deserves it. His records are well-produced, his parodies work and he's often very funny. These three things are not true of most of the folks out there who think they can be "Weird Al." But they're true of "Weird Al."
Our feature presentation is one of his earlier efforts — the music video for "I Lost on Jeopardy," complete with appearances by Art Fleming and Don Pardo, who hosted and announced the show in its first incarnation. And Dr. Demento's in there, too.
Very nice birthday celebration last evening for Marv Wolfman. His charming spouse Noel arranged it all at an outlet of a chain I'd never heard of before — Dave and Buster's. Here's their website if you're interested. They're kind of like Chuck E. Cheese for a slightly older audience. They have video games and non-video games and pool tables and private rooms for parties and apart from the fact that it meant driving to Arcadia, it was a great experience.
After grub (but before cake and present-opening), we all fanned out through the place for some serious gaming. My longtime friend Alan Brennert claimed he'd never played any of these games before...then went up to a claw machine and, first time out, snagged a very nice wristwatch. In the background, one could almost hear the manager yelling at someone, "What's wrong with that claw machine out there? Somebody actually won something!" I did great at Skee Ball. In fact, I'm seriously considering quitting this silly writing business and seeing what kind of living I can make hustling Skee Ball.
Carolyn and I almost didn't make it there because we did something extremely foolish out in the parking lot. We tried to follow the signs. Please note that if you ever go out to the Westfield Mall in Arcadia and want to find the Dave and Buster's, it's easy. Just do the opposite of what the signs tell you. If they have an arrow pointing left, turn right and vice-versa. It'll get you right there.
Frank Rich has a good piece on the recent revelations of White House spying without proper warrants and secret torture programs. Here are two key paragraphs...
President Bush, himself a sometime leaker of intelligence, called the leaking of the N.S.A. surveillance program a "shameful act" that is "helping the enemy." Porter Goss, who was then still C.I.A. director, piled on in February with a Times Op-Ed piece denouncing leakers for potentially risking American lives and compromising national security. When reporters at both papers [The New York Times and The Washington Post] were awarded Pulitzer Prizes last month, administration surrogates, led by bloviator in chief William Bennett, called for them to be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act.
We can see this charade for what it is: a Hail Mary pass by the leaders who bungled a war and want to change the subject to the journalists who caught them in the act. What really angers the White House and its defenders about both the Post and Times scoops are not the legal questions the stories raise about unregulated gulags and unconstitutional domestic snooping, but the unmasking of yet more administration failures in a war effort riddled with ineptitude. It's the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press's exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security. That's where the buck stops, and if there's to be a witch hunt for traitors, that's where it should begin.
I never understood how it hurt anything, aside from the White House's reputation, to reveal that our government was not following the rules about warrants when wiretapping terrorism suspects. Is there a terrorist anywhere who didn't suspect his calls might be monitored? Especially with John Ashcroft announcing, every time he upped the terrorism alert level, that they'd picked up "chatter" of something in the works.
May 15, 2006
