Friday, December 22, 2006

No Shopping Days Left

Is this new? My e-mailbox this morning is filled with advertising from almost every merchant with whom I've done business in the last year or two...messages with Subject Lines like "It's not too late" or "Still time to shop." Some say that if I order from them by Noon and pay some huge Saturday FedEx delivery fee, they'll get my last-minute gift to someone tomorrow so the person will have it before Christmas.

Okay, I think I remember a lot of similar e-mails last year. What I don't remember is this offer that a number of them are also making...

Place your order by Midnight on Saturday night and we'll e-mail your recipient and tell them your gift is on the way and that it will arrive shortly after Christmas.

Years ago, Saturday Night Live had a bogus commercial for a FedEx-type company that would take the blame for late packages. If you were two weeks late sending someone something, they'd deliver it and — presumably for a hefty price — swear you'd sent it three weeks earlier. We may be only one Christmas from such a service becoming available to us. You'll be able to order on December 26 and they'll deliver it on December 28 with their apology for delaying an order placed on December 18. Watch for it.

• Posted at 10:17 AM · LINK

A Holiday Freebee

Do you know what Rifftrax are? Well, this page will explain what they are and also give you a chance to get a free one. But basically, what they are are "alternative commentary tracks" for your favorite DVDs. A team of expert riffers record silly comments in the manner of Mystery Science Theater 3000, a classic series for which the same riffers riffed.

So you got the concept? The guys from MST3000 record new commentary tracks...you buy and download them...then you watch the DVD but you listen to their comments. Only in this case, you don't have to buy your first one since they're making one — for Nestor, The Long-Eared Christmas Donkey — available for free. Give it a try. Nothing to lose.

• Posted at 1:32 AM · LINK

No Deal

A kindly reader of this site sent me a nice Christmas gift — the PC version of the Deal or No Deal game show. At least, I think it was a kind gesture. It may have been one of the half-dozen folks who routinely send me e-mails explaining how I'm wrong not to think George W. Bush is a great president. I wouldn't put it past one of them to think they could keep me busy with the game so I wouldn't post any more articles that make them grind their molars.

If that was the goal, they figured wrong. The computer version of Deal or No Deal wouldn't keep anyone busy for more than about fifteen minutes. You play it a couple of times, ogle the odd graphics and put it away forever. Gamewise, it's a faithful reproduction of the TV show but all the fancy music and dramatic pauses still cause a very simple game to take a lot longer than it should. There are many online versions (including this one on the NBC website) that let you play the same game a lot faster.

The only reason to spring for the twenty bucks and get the PC version is for the graphics...and I might have gone for it if they had the real models in there and you felt Up Close and Personal with them as you played. But all the people — Howie Mandel, the models, even the audience — are CGI animations and the models are all generic, unsexy types. Howie's pretty generic and unsexy, too...and it's a little creepy to watch the computer-animated representation of him gesturing with odd, mechanical gestures and speaking with almost no lip-sync.

Makes you wonder why they went to the trouble to build a computer-animated Howie Mandel. Why didn't they just videotape the real guy? I'm guessing they did the whole thing in CGI because it would have been too expensive to pay all 26 models to actually appear in the game, Too bad...because it might have made you feel like you were actually playing for real. As it was, I almost wanted to take a bad banker's offer just so I could get out and stop looking at the weird computerized people.

• Posted at 1:24 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

I actually never saw this before I spotted it on YouTube. It's the opening to the 1988 Yogi Bear Show and it's made up of clips from classic Yogi cartoons (many of them from the feature, Hey There, It's Yogi Bear) and a pleasant, newly-recorded rendition of Yogi's theme song.

Joe Barbera always resisted when people asked him to name his favorite character. It was the one they were currently working on, he'd say. But I'm convinced that if you'd strapped him down and pumped him full of sodium pentothal, he'd have told you Yogi was his fave. A couple times, we got to talking about that bear and you could always see the man's face light up. It was the only Hanna-Barbera character I ever heard him imitate. Of course, some of that may have been because Yogi was the studio's first superstar.

J.B. and I had an interesting conversation one day about Yogi. In some of his cartoons, Yogi is a real operator, largely in control of the situation, able to con tourists out of their pic-a-nic baskets and to snow the Ranger and not get punished. In others, he's something of a victim, unable to escape from Jellystone Park or getting repeatedly blasted and mauled by the crew of a movie shooting in the park. I generally preferred the competent con artist Yogi and wrote him that way whenever I wrote him...but I had to ask Mr. B. why the inconsistency.

He was startled by the question and admitted he'd never noticed the change. At the same time though, he acknowledged it was a valid observation and he began puzzling it out. After a pause, he said something like, "I think the problem was that we weren't used to doing cartoons for television then. We'd been doing the Tom and Jerrys and you never worried about that kind of thing because no one ever saw the films again. They ran and then they went away so if you had a funny idea, you just did it. Once we got established in television, we learned that these things would be rerun over and over so you had to be consistent from one to another."

That sounded like a good explanation to me...and as I type it here, it occurs to me that it may also be a partial answer to a question I was asked the other day on Shokus Internet Radio. A caller asked why Barney Rubble's voice changed so much from week to week during the first season of The Flintstones even when it was still Mel Blanc doing it.

Anyway, here's the opening to the '88 Yogi Bear program...

• Posted at 1:19 AM · LINK