Oh, Fudge Pt. 2
This is one of the most [BLEEP] amazing pieces of [BLEEP] children's television I have ever [BLEEP] seen. Now this isn't only due the puritanical nature of American television having made the censor-bleep funnier and more obscene than any swear word one could imagine - just watch Jon Stewart for irrefutable proof of this. And it is not just because this episode of a children's show features a bunch of kids throwin' cusses like Ice Cube on a bender. No, the best part is that swearing is treated like the Dune film's Weirding Module: you say it, shit blows up but good.
Low-Effort Blog Post
I start the post off lazily co-opting the script technique of the videos below. I mention how uproariously funny they are and use the word “fantastic” about three times before going to Thesarurus.com to find some synonyms. I note a comparison to some piece of high-art or cite some philosophical piece which regards itself with the concept of “meta” and of which I have read five pages, tops. I link the the first video which is slightly shorter. As it is news-related, I make an offhand crack at Jon Stewart or the Daily Show.
Now I link the longer video. It is film related and I have enough opinions on film and technique to fill an ale cask, so I go on and on. You probably lose interest at this point and begin watching the video. Hopefully. I may mention something resembling this that I saw in my youth and describe the circumstances in an equally detached and nostalgic manner. I finish the post, advertise it on every social network I subscribe to and go eat a hamburger.
Shadow and Substance
Last night, while watching my friend's newly acquired copy of the second season of the Simpsons (highly recommended!) he confided in me that he had never seen an episode of the Twilight Zone. This surprised me. My primary social circle has at some point in their lives given themselves up to the neon claws of television addiction. This is why I can watch something, say a random episode from the second season of the Simpsons which I have not seen in ten years, and recite the dialogue – pauses and grumbles intact – as if I have been diligently studying the script for a soon-coming performance.
Original Pilot Intro
I watched a lot of the Twilight Zone as a kid and teenager. Most of it took place in the form of New Year's Eve marathons, which was the only way I could catch it before we got cable. When I was in high school, the SciFi Channel put it on somewhere around the prime time hours and, having discovered the dark secret to getting Bs without doing any homework, I ate it up every night.
Alternate Intro for Season 1 or 2
I can't say the show ever genuinely scared me. Only two supernatural things scared me as a kid and I guess I was fortunate in that neither the gremlins from the movie Gremlins nor abductions by Greys featured on the show. So I was good. Honestly, the only feeling I had toward it was honest-to-goodness delight and excitement. Every episode was creepy music, cheesy special effects and a genuinely well-written twist ending. I loved the twist endings the most. I guess I could probably see them coming these days, but as a nine-year-old every single one was a chilling surprise: “It's a cookbook?!” “Oh no! His glasses!” “Holy god giant jack-in-the-box!” &c &c.
So, if you have never seen it, go on YouTube and watch some Twilight Zone. escodavi has a few episodes in great quality.
Chicken or Sausage?
Considering it was on while I was supposed to be at school, I'm not exactly sure how I've watched as much Kids in the Hall as I believe I did. Perhaps it is the fault of the speeding-up of time due to aging. What was a few sick days from school here or a weekend-long Comedy Central marathon there all gets lumped in together as a quasi-false memory of spending my formative years watching the show regularly. The KITH memory that stands loud-and-proud in my mind is first encountering the “Sausages” sketch.
I can actually pinpoint when I first saw this. It must have been around my junior year of high school as that was time when I received a bootleg copy of Eraserhead off eBay. This was before broadband and filesharing was a Thing, so I had to pay upwards of $30 for a copy of a VHS copy of the Japanese LaserDisc. Anyhow, the point is that I saw “Sausages” and immediately connected it with David Lynch (or, rather, Eraserhead, which was the only Lynch film I had seen at that point.) Something about the pitch-black almost-humor, the collapsing industrial setting, the dreaminess of it all screamed of Lynch's intentional obscurity. When I discovered the plethora of KITH videos on YouTube and informed my Eraserhead-loving best friend, she immediately demanded to watch “Sausages,” affirming my connection. If you've never seen Eraserhead here's a trailer so you can compare.:
Comparing the two side-by-side, I've noticed a few direct references. There is definitely an overlap in the scoring of the two; most of the background noise is composed of industrial drones raised to foreground volume levels. Both films contain unconsummated love affairs, and both feature infirm older characters. Finally, there's the overlap between these two shots, which I refuse to believe is any sort of coincidence.
You can actually watch the entirety of Eraserhead on YouTube if you so desire. I suggest against it, but I realize not everyone has access to Netflix or indie theaters. So, this user seems to have the entire film in even better quality than I first witnessed it. But I urge you, if it is ever playing at a midnight showing at the local college or revival house, go see it. It's one of the best experimental films to have ever come out of the United States. And always remember what David Lynch has to say:
Tom and Jerry via Marx and Engels
If there is one thing nearly every Soviet child grew up watching, it is a cartoon by the name Nu Pogodi!/Ну, погоди! The title translates, roughly, to “Well, Just You Wait!” and the plot of the individual episodes is, for all intents and purposes, a prolonged chase scene. In fact if you ask anyone who grew up watching this show to describe it in a phrase, “the Russian Tom and Jerry” is what you'll hear most frequently.
Image co. Wikipedia.
There are two main characters: Wolf (Volk/Волк) and Hare (Zajats/Заяц). As the show falls along the lines of a funny animal cartoon, the animals walk upright, speak and have distinct personalities. Wolf is a social undesirable: he's a smoker, a vandal, a minor criminal, an awful guitar player, &c &c. A friend of has made the case that Wolf is a unflattering caricature of an urban Soviet gypsy/Roma; personally, I don't really see it – he seems more of a slacker/bohemian type to me – but it is something to keep in mind. The Hare, on the other hand, is a model Soviet. Socially conscious and morally upright, he participates positively in society and causes harm to no one. Well, no one except Wolf, who is constantly and unsuccessfully trying to capture and eat him.
Image co. English Russia.
Some of my most fond memories involve watching show. I was practically weaned on it. My paternal grandfather had a reel-to-reel and he would set it up in his bedroom and project the show onto a sheet, while a record of the sound effects played in the background. My maternal grandmother had a smuggled black-and-white VCR on which I would watch bootlegged Mickey Mouse and Tom and Jerry cartoons, but somehow I always appreciated the projector more.
Here are two of my favorite episodes. Pretty much every single episode may be found on YouTube by searching for "Nu Pogodi". You don't actually have to know Russian to enjoy watching; like the old Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons, almost everything can be gleaned from context. Wolf usually shouts a single phrase per episode, which is a variation on the title. Oh, and don't bother with the 1990s episodes.
Episode 4: Stadium (1971)
Episode 7: Sea Voyage (1973)
Change My Pitch Up
One of my favorite comics-based television series was the Justice League Unlimited. Its roots were the the serious-but-still-fun 1990s Batman: The Animated Series and meant as a sequel to the Justice League. JLU focused on expanding the standard, comics-DC Universe into the DC Animated Universe. While revolving mainly around the standard JL team (Superman, Batman, et. al.) each episode had guest stars and cameos ranging from the obvious (Aquaman) to the obscure-ca.-2004 (the Crimson Avenger). Again, it balanced good old fashioned superheroics – there was a drag-out fight almost guaranteed in each episode – with surprisingly consistent and three-dimensional characterization and an evolving continuity. While the episodes stood on their own, there was an overall arc which was very clearly plotted out from the beginning and expanded on within each episode.
Img. co DCAU Wiki.
The Justice League Unlimited episode “Ultimatum" presented a team of superpowered individuals named the Ultimen. Pictured above, the Ultimen consisted of , from left to right: Wind Dragon, Juice, Long Shadow, Downpour and Shifter. The Ultimen were a the face of a secret project meant to discredit the Justice League, who were growing too powerful for the shadow government's comfort.
If the character designs seem a little familiar, that's because these are all rehashed versions of the superheroes created by Hanna Barbera. Invented for the numerous incarnations of the 1970s and 80s DC comics cartoon Super Friends, they were an attempt to insert some multiculturalism an viewer-identification (the previous characters meant for the latter purpose were the unpowered Wendy and Marvin and fit in about as well as it sounds.) Wind Dragon was based on Samurai, Juice on Black Vulcan, Long Shadow on Apache Chief, and Downpour and Shifter on Zan and Jayna, the Wonder Twins. One of the numerous in-jokes about the Ultimen was that they reflected the mores of the Superfriends era. In contrast to the secretive Justice League, the Ultimen were publicly-oriented and unnaturally wholesome; even Superman, the invulnerable boy scout, had trouble withstanding their wholesomeness.
One of the other major alterations to the series was the updating of Aquaman's incarnation to that of the 1990s Peter David version. No longer the useless-on-land hero of yesteryear, Aquaman became the warrior-king of 70% of Earth's surface. It is the conflict between Aquaman and the Ultimen that is the meat of this post, referenced way the hell up at the beginning. It is also my absolute favorite scene in Justice League Unlimited. Context-wise, the Ultimen and the Justice League got into the requisite battle and Aquaman has just taken out Downpour's sibling Shifter. (It should start playing at 2:03 into the video.)
Having grown up watching Superfriends - thanks Cartoon Network - I have to say that was a long time coming.
The Language of the Unheard
"When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative." - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Today is the tenth anniversary of the national recognition of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Ten years ago it stopped being the impotently-named “Civil Rights Day” in Utah and “Lee-Jackson-King” day – wherein General Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson got top billing over MLK – in Virginia. As a nation we get closer and closer to readily acknowledging that we have and continue to be terrible not just to blacks, but to everyone. Martin Luther King Jr.'s efforts, the efforts which eventually won him a bullet in the head, worked toward dismantling the mindset of a nation which emancipated its slaves only to treat their newly-fellow citizens with as much vitriol and derision as it could muster. A nation where the poor took up arms against the poor on the basis on the basis of tradition. The same “tradition” which prevented them from ever seeing past these artificial divisions long enough to rise out of the shit they were born into, lived in and died surrounded by.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a dangerous subversive at a time when the country desperately, desperately needed dangerous subversion. It is important to remember the need if only because it is easy to imagine the '50s were Leave it to Beaver and the '60s were long hair and free love. These years were a peak of institutionalized hate; a time when giving your fellow citizen the shit end of the stick on principle was status-fuck-quo. I'm not saying we live in some sort of post-racial wonderland right now. I'd like to think things are a bit easier for blacks, but we still have sundown towns, and constituencies which would elect Strom Thurmond's desiccated corpse were they allowed to. And we still institutionally (that is: without openly acknowledging it even to our individual selves) maltreat fellow citizens on account of race, class, creed, gender and orientation. I can't even acknowledge that I or anyone I know are totally free from the prejudice of even a single one of those concepts.
This country, by the very laws which make it free, needs its revolutionaries. We shouldn't be remembering Martin Luther King Jr. as an individual who was honored as an assassinated orator. We should remember him as a man who a malformed social system resisted at every turn. A man who inspired right-minded individuals of all walks to brave police, hoses and dogs to tell the world that society had internalized a disease, and they would put their very lives on the line to expunge it from the body politic. An idealized perspective, definitely, but sometimes idealism is exactly what we need to fight for a day which it is necessary to fight for, but may sadly never come.
I think everyone who is reading this ought to take some time out and watch Spike Lee's Bamboozled (trailer). Spike Lee is a director of eminent skill and has the unblinking fearlessness needed to create a film about a black man bringing back blackface minstrelsy to the people. Black face minstrelsy, you ask? Didn't that go away with vaudeville and penny-farthings? I wish. In 1978, 1978, the British could turn on their televisions and tune into this (the actual clip is from a 1960s episode):
That's the Black and White Minstrel Show. A huge BBC hit up until the year before All In The Family was canceled. (Aside: I am aware that that All in the Family, one of the first sitcoms to deal head-on with social ills, was based upon a British show, but my point stands.) This show wasn't satire or anything but what it looks like. In fact, the show lost audience when they stopped doing it in blackface. And for those of you who are enjoying the entertainment value of this, which it has in a sugary and mindless fashion, Lee addresses that in his film. You will laugh because it is funny and you will feel uncomfortable because … it is funny. Bamboozled is probably the best exploration of the African-American in media I've ever seen, and an amazing (and highly expressionist) film to boot.
It Turns Out It’s Man
Settle down, class. It's time for today's lesson in trivial referentiality. Now, we all remember the opening theme to Futurama, right? I mean, I do, but I have a tendency to rewatch the entire run every few months. Here's a refresher:
Now here is Pierre Henry's 1967 hit “Psyché Rock”:
...and that's how crayons are made.
Image co. The Infosphere
Robert’s Rules of Death
I watched Ingmar Bergman's 1957 classic The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet) last night. For those of you who have never seen it, the mark the film left on media is absolutely indelible. Its imagery persists through time, especially in the films of Woody Allen, who loudly and proudly carries Bergman's influence on his cinematic sleeve. One of my favorite Allen films, Love and Death, references it repeatedly, as does Bananas (which, in an irrelevant aside, also takes credit for being one of Sylvester Stallone's first feature film appearances.) This is the film that loosed the robed-and-accented-Death-as-the-Grim-Reaper archetype into pop culture, although the figure eventually evolved into a skeleton in a robe, rather than a pale man. Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, for instance, took Bergman's character wholesale, barely bothering to modify it.
The iconic chess match between the wittily morbid Death incarnate and the unfearing Knight has also been repeatedly referenced. I've spotted it most recently opening Grant Morrison's loving comics-medium paean Seaguy.
My personal favorite (and first witnessed) homage the film was an episode of Animaniacs entitled “Meatballs or Consequences.” On location in Sweden (birtplace and lifelong home of Ingmar Bergman and the setting of The Seventh Seal) for a meatball eating contest, Wakko Warner imbibes one too many and dies, to be escorted into the afterlife by a Swedish-accented Death. The cartoon goes on to parody not just the plot and setting of Seventh Seal, but also the classic lipline-match scene from Bergman's 1966 film Persona. Fun fact: it's one of Bergman's better known pieces of imagery outside of Seventh Seal and was also parodied in Love and Death (roughly 2:20 in. Spoiler alert: Final scene of the film.) Unfortunately, I can't track down the original scene from Persona. Anyway, here's the cartoon. Enjoy!
In unrelated news, my friend Nathan a.k.a. Renegade Accordion (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) was profiled by Thirteen. He busks around the city, playing accordion in his trademark Boba Fett helmet. If you see him, say hello! (He plays parties too, folks.)
New York on the Clock: Nathan Stodola, Renegade Accordion from Thirteen.org on Vimeo.
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