A Long And Prosperous Career

Image source.

Live Long and Prosper, Fellow Trekkers!   

On February 27, 2015 celebrated actor, writer, director and photographer Leonard Nimoy succumbed to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease brought on by a lifetime of smoking. Nimoy had come forward with this diagnosis only about a year ago, via a series of Tweets:

As Spock himself might say: "The practice of voluntarily inhaling carcinogenic smoke for pleasure is highly illogical."

Now, I've already talked about the photon-torpedo-style impact that the original Star Trek had on my childhood and my imagination. Episodes such as "The Corbomite Maneuver" and "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" scared the ever-lovin' bejesus outta me, "Arena", "Balance of Terror" and "The Doomsday Machine" thrilled me and "The City on the Edge of Forever" caused my brain to explode and leak out of my left ear.

Notwithstanding the hideously-dated, (not-so) special-effects, swingin' 60's aesthetic and cringe-worthy lapses into sexism, Star Trek was still light years ahead of its time. At the heart of the show's appeal was the trifecta relationship between the fiery Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy (DeForest Kelley), walking gonad / Horatio Hornblower-wannabe Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and, of course, the emotionless Vulcan science officer Spock, played to unparalleled perfection by Nimoy.

Sci-fi fans owe Leonard a boundless debt of gratitude since he personally innovated several famous Vulcan customs. For example, Spock's famous hand sign greeting can be directly attributed to the actor's Jewish heritage:

As a socially-awkward only child growing up in self-imposed isolation, I really identified with Spock. He was sharp, guarded, outwardly self-assured but visibly different and because of this he was often the subject of undermining ridicule, disproportionate criticism and blatant hostility. Perhaps the most telling thing about Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future is that, in spite of all of our progress in science, technology, medicine and interstellar travel, human beings will still fall prey to xenophobia from time to time. Contrary to what the average Republican believes, prejudice is something that our primitive reptilian brains will always be forced to contend with.

Typically Spock dealt with this human flaw with characteristic aplomb: usually with a raised eyebrow and a dismissive shot at the barbarity of Earth history. This often left Doctor McCoy apoplectic with rage and inadvertently becoming Exhibit "A" in Spock's case against the dangers of unchecked human emotions. Checkmate, Doctor.   

Here Spock and McCoy debate the ethical ramifications of the life-creating Genesis torpedo from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan:

McCoy: Dear Lord. You think we're intelligent enough to... suppose... what if this thing were used where life already exists?
Spock: It would destroy such life in favor of its new matrix.
McCoy: Its "new matrix"? Do you have any idea what you're saying?
Spock: I was not attempting to evaluate its moral implications, Doctor. As a matter of cosmic history, it has always been easier to destroy than to create.
McCoy: Not anymore; now we can do both at the same time! According to myth, the Earth was created in six days. Now, watch out! Here comes Genesis! We'll do it for you in six minutes!
Spock: Really, Dr. McCoy. You must learn to govern your passions; they will be your undoing. Logic suggests...
McCoy: Logic? My God, the man's talking about logic; we're talking about universal Armageddon! You green-blooded, inhuman...

As a viewer I always got the impression that the constant barrage of Romulan-water-torture-style cheap shots and subtle verbal bullying heaped upon Spock over the years were building up to some sort of breaking point. On those rare occasions when Spock did snap, it usually involved some powerful exterior influence, whether it be a chronic case of Vulcan case of blue balls, as in "Amok Time":

Or an emotion-twisting space virus like in "The Naked Time":

Or some mind-bending plant spores, as evidenced in "This Side of Paradise":

It's probably super-naive to say this, but I wonder if things would have turned out differently if the Columbine kids were Trekkies instead of fans of Natural Born Killers. Although I'd never blame music, books or movies for societal ills, Spock's penchant for taking the higher ground is pretty admirable when compared to the nihilistic actions of Mickey and Mallory.

More evidence that the original Trek was way ahead of its time: the show became a massive hit in syndication years after it was prematurely cancelled. When it became a full-fledged cultural phenomenon, the stars of the show were instantly catapulted into dizzying levels of fame. So closely associated were they with these iconic, larger-than-life characters, that many of them struggled with typecasting. And since no one was more iconic than Spock, Nimoy faced particular challenges.

After putting out a methinks-thou-dost-protest-too-much autobiography titled I Am Not Spock, rumors began to swirl that Nimoy refused to appear in Star Trek II unless his Vulcan alter-ego was killed off. Even though there's barely any pre-internet evidence to support this, it didn't prevent hordes of unbalanced Trekkies from sending death threats to the actor. Wow, talk about ungoverned passions!

In spite of this distasteful experience, Nimoy seemed to warm up to Spock not long after. This may have, in part, been due to the widespread success of The Wrath of Khan as well as the opportunity to direct two of the franchise's most successful sequels: The Search for Spock in 1984 and The Voyage Home in 1986. Whatever the reason, Nimoy seemed content with his legacy, publishing the apologetic-sounding I Am Spock follow-up bio as an olive branch to fans in 1995.

Via this one humble little blog entry I hope to convey just how versatile and well-rounded Leonard was. In addition to directing movies with the words "Star" and "Trek" in the title, he also gave us this seminal 80's comedy hit:

Nimoy also hosted one of the earliest and most intriguing "mysteries of the universe"-type shows: In Search Of...

Although we're in the midst of a promising wave of body acceptance awareness, the subject wasn't quite as sexy back in 2007. Leonard was on the vanguard of this movement with the Full Body Project, a series of photographs which tried to present some more realistic examples of proud female beauty.

Even though I feel ridiculous saying this, the following link is decidedly not suitable for work:

THE FULL BODY PROJECT BY LEONARD NIMOY (NSFW)

Leonard got his start in live theater and by all accounts his performances as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and the title role in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Sherlock Holmes garnered considerable acclaim. In 1981, he starred in Vincent, a one-man show based on the life of artist Vincent van Gogh.

Then there's his subtle-but-memorable turn as a cold-fish, Dr. Phil-type pop psychologist in Philip Kaufman's chilling remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978):

And who could possible forget his self-depreciating vocal performance in the "Marge vs. The Monorail" episode of The Simpsons?:

Leonard is gone now and I can't help but feel that a chunk of reality or a piece of the universe is missing. I'll always be grateful to him for making me feel considerably more fortified as a kid and I think that everyone else should miss him for all of the innovative things he did for pop culture and the rest of his fellow human beings.

EPIC FEELS   Damn, it's times like this when I wish that the Vulcan ritual of kolinahr was a real thing.

EPIC HUMAN #1   I dare you to get through this without blubbering like a space virus-infected Vulcan.


EPIC HUMAN #2   Leonard was a pay equity champion long before...well, long before women were forced to bring this insane issue up again just recently. 

EPIC TUNE  In addition to all of his other accomplishments, Nimoy was a pretty rad singer / songwriter. Check out this half-groovy, all-nerdy, 100% pimp geek anthem:

P.S. I don't know what the deal is with Leonard and memorable hand gestures but my friends and I have officially re-dubbed the gang sign that he throws up @ 1:16 as THE NIMOY. We still use it routinely in casual conversation. Yeah, that's right, we're cool.

EPIC MINI DOC  Leonard Nimoy's Boston. As Spock himself might say: "Fascinating."

SEMI-EPIC MEME   Just to address the obvious question on your mind, Gentle Reader:

THE I AM NOT SPOCK COSTUME FAIL  Seriously, this is what I was wearing when I left the house last Halloween. Needless to way, I'm w-a-a-a-a-a-a-y too round-headed to pull off the inherent dignity of Spock. I look more like Denise Crosby as Sela, fer f#ck sakes.   

THE I AM DEFINITELY NOT SPOCK FAIL  Dear J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof: if the S.I.N.O. (Spock In Name Only) who appears in your remake / reboot / re-imagining / spiritual travesty is trying to solve problems by REPEATEDLY PUNCHING PEOPLE OVER AND OVER AGAIN IN THE FACE then you really don't have single clue about this character. IMHO, this one scene alone is resignation-worthy. Hang your heads in shame, you attention-deficit-disorder clowns!

They've Got Us All By The Roddenberries

Hey, Y'All!

Recently an acquaintance of mine posted the following Bookface™ pronouncement.  Reading it kinda broke my heart:

"With _______ back in school I fear I may have to get a 'regular' job. Doing anything other than acting, writing, directing or performing in some way is seriously PAINFUL when I know that I have been born to do nothing else but create art." 

The person who wrote that really shouldn't have to worry about such things.  She's an incredibly hard-working and talented vocalist and actor and I really do believe that neither the world nor reality has any right to ask her to do anything different.   

When I was working in a call center people would always come up to me and say: "OMG!  You're sooooo creative. You're just wasting your time here.  You should be out there doing something with your gifts."

To which I'd usually reply: "Really, wow, that's great advice, but who's gonna bankroll this l'il venture?  Are you gonna sponsor me for this noble but highly unprofitable cause?" 

That would usually shut them up.  

Indeed, we as a society always profess to love our artists, but we never seem to want to put our money where our collective mouths are.  Certainly our block-headed Conservative Harper government doesn't seem to want to help.  I used to witness this crap first-hand as a kid when someone would commission my Dad to do a custom painting and then haggle with him over the already-agreed-upon price, knowing full well that he couldn't sell it to anyone else.  

Look, I'm one of the biggest supporters of capitalism on this planet.  After all, I wouldn't have self-published a book if I didn't think I could sell it for my own financial betterment.  But I'm afraid that, more and more every day, we're moving away from capitalism and veering dangerously towards corporatism.  

I'm constantly hearing tales about how creative, unique people are being forced to abandon their dreams, turn a blind eye to their talents and pledge their allegiance to a patron corporation who's entire function is to turn them into interchangeable drones whose sole function is to make a bunch of rich assholes even richer.  Why is this happening so much?  Because they can't afford to survive financially the way our society is currently set up.

Like you, I never had a say in how things are done in this great, big, wacky world of ours.  As a kid I can remember watching Star Trek and trying to figure out why humanity didn't strive to be a little bit more like the future depicted in this visionary show.  Well, minus the rampant sexism, of course.      

Although I consider the philosophies of the original, early 60's iteration of Star Trek to be half-baked at best, the concept really came to term during the Next Generation run.  It's here that Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future really came into focus.  He seemed to be telling us that one day we'd all look at each other and go: "Hey, we're all not all so different from one another after all!  Why don't we stop all this greedy fussin' and a-feudin' and actually work together for a change!  We could achieve some incredible stuff!"

 

Indeed.  Perhaps the most intriguing thing Roddenberry posits is the end to monetary pursuits.  His society still has jobs and careers that need doing, but people volunteer to do them.  That way, what you choose to do with your life dove-tails perfectly with your area of interest.  If you're the risk taking type you can become a starship captain.  If you're the creative sort and want to become a traveling interstellar playwright, we gotcha covered.  Hells, even if you wanna do something totally pedestrian like tend the gardens outside Starfleet Academy, why you can just go ahead and fill your trowel!

It's like when Spock tells Kirk in Wrath of Khan: ""If I may be so bold, it was a mistake for you to accept promotion. Commanding a starship is your first, best destiny; anything else is a waste of material." 

So what if being an actor, writer or musician is your first best destiny?  Well, in our society, you'll likely end up with a title like "customer service specialist"; a fate just as wrong-headed as Kirk's promotion to Admiral.   

However, in the utopia if Star Trek, the space government will give you a place to live, food and all the amenities you could ever want.  Presumably as long as you continue to do something productive.  Certainly these philosophies are relevant to more then just artists.  It has the potential to re-work our entire way of thinking.  Can you imagine being free to live your life exactly how you want to, without having to perform meaningless tasks to earn paper credits which, in turn, you can exchange for the privileged of not starving to death or dying of exposure during the winter? 

For an inexplicably large chunk of the population, particularly in the U.S., they most certainly do not want to even ponder such a hellish scenario. They even have a label for just such a repellent concept.  It's a filthy word, a word which instantly conjures up images of shiftless hippies, idle immigrants and communist sympathizers.

That word is "socialism".  

I once got into a knock-down, drag-out argument with a particularly myopic co-worker over this.  After the left-leaning NDP party got elected here in Nova Scotia he went on a loud, public tirade about how their "socialist ways" would soon interfere with the business world and blissfully hand out a free lunch to all kinds of deadbeats and slackers.  

"That's friggin' ridiculous," I shot back.  "Do you really have such a low opinion of your fellow human beings?  Most folks are extremely dedicated and hard-working.  They get a sense of fulfillment and gratification when they feel as if they're contributing to society.  Trouble is, most jobs nowadays are so devoid of free will and creativity that people start to go a bit nuts after doing them for a few months..."

"But that's part of the streamlining process for businesses!" he replied.  "When there's turnover they don't have to put a ton of effort into training people!"

"When did not training people become a good thing?  Besides, what happens when some rich company decides they're not making quite enough money so they lay off all of their workers and ship their jobs down to Guatemala?  Don't you think some higher authority should be able to step in and say 'Hey, look!  We've seen your public records and your company isn't in any financial danger.  You're just doing this to increase the bottom line and make the investors even richer.  You can't do that!"

"Absolutely not!" he shouted back.  "Government has no right to stick their noses into business matters.  If I've worked my ass off to build a successful operation, the last thing I want is some outside influence telling me what to do!"

"Well that would be all well and good if these giant corporations could be trusted to do the right thing!"  I countered.  "I've seen vibrant, healthy businesses lay off people just because the minimum wage went up.  I've seen people forced to work long hours in terrible, stressful and unhealthy conditions.  I've seen supposedly respectable companies close up shop and move just because they couldn't extort enough tax breaks out of the regional government."  

"Well, I...uh..," he stammered.

"And what about all the poor slobs who's lives you've just upset in your quest to maximize profits?  Don't you think there should be some sort of government-sponsored support system to help people survive financially without devastating their life savings as they look for a new job?"

"Yeah, but people abuse stuff like that!"

"Then crack down on the abusers!" I yelled.  "Don't blame honest people for the failings of a few bad apples!  Sometimes corporate assholes do bad things to legitimately good people.  Trust me, I know!"

Yeah, he got real quiet after that.

But there's more lunacy afoot.  The endless debate on universal health care in the U.S. really cracks me up.  Why wouldn't you support a program that could provide basic unalienable rights to those unfortunate souls who don't have access to an affordable company-sponsored health care system?  Cripes, I can't believe that people wouldn't at least like see crooked HMO's get their just deserts.  I'm talking about the criminals who won't cover someone's medical bills just because they happened to be unconscious en route to the hospital after a car crash and couldn't fill out their paperwork properly. 

Seriously, it's like we're still all living in the Dark Ages, people!  It's like we're all still serfs in a feudal society and the Kings are the corporations.


Folks are so concerned and paranoid that someone else might get a slight advantage over them, they just freak the hell out.  Until we all stop being so petty and preoccupied with counting everyone else's beans, there will always be this crazed, irrational hatred for what's been mislabeled by the media and public perception as "socialist".  

For the record, my definition of socialism is "common sense".  It's a focus an humanism, work-life balance and a strong desire to make our world more viable by providing a level playing field for everyone.  I truly believe that the measure of a civilization is how it treats its most underprivileged members.  

Until this perception changes and we look at alternate ways to run our society (perhaps inspired somewhat by the Great Bird of the Galaxy himself), we're just gonna keep frittering our lives away, investing large chunks of our limited time on earth doing monotonous tasks to benefit a bunch of elite, rich jack-holes who don't give a crap about us.  

These corporate bloodsuckers just love to see the word "socialist" get misinterpreted by the media over and over again.  After all, why would they want to change the status quo?  It certainly wouldn't help their pledge for self-supremacy, now would it?


EPIC  This whole doc is pretty cool, but if you skip to Part III ("Project Earth") @ the 1:30 mark you can ponder another person's well-researched speculation of what society could be if we all just got on the same page...

    

EPIC TOO  Leave it to Jon Stewart to boil things down for us...




FAIL  Good litmus test: if you tend to think that Rupert Murdoch's lapdog Glenn Beck is completely bazonkers then you're on the right track.  This is actually one of the tamer clips I could find of this nut bar:

T.V. or not T.V.? - Part II - Sitcoms and Shenannigans

Wagwan, my brothas!

My early preference for T.V. wasn't just limited to sci-fi or animated fare.  No, I also loved action/drama type shows like Emergency!: (1972-1977)

My mom used to keep a childhood scrapbook for me and every year I'd write in what I wanted to be when I grew up.  It's because of Emergency! that "Paramedic" and "Doctor" was added to an ever-changing litany that changed every year. (and regrettably, still does!)

I have so many found memories of this show.  I loved the red emergency vehicles, the tackle boxes filled with meds and the ultra-cool "Biophone":

This bad-boy's on my Christmas list this year.

Although Emergency! was technically aimed at adults, I'm sure it's was still responsible for selling an ass-load of "Hot Wheels" fire engines and "Adventure People" rescue trucks:

And to make sure law enforcement was well-represented I also had a huge interest in CHiP's: (1977-1983)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTDOLoDiOcg&feature=related

Wow.  Sometimes it's strangely comforting to be reminded that Erik Estrada once had a career.   

Even as an seven year old kid, this next show held a certain inexplicable fascination for me.  It's a shame that it many ways it set the role of women back to the Dark Ages.   

Charlie's Angels (1976-1981)

Mmmmmm, Jaclyn Smith.  Er, sorry. 

Before David Hasselhoff held court over a parade of blond, bouncy, beach bimbos (and w-a-a-a-a-a-y before he developed a penchant for Formica-flavored fast food), he was totally pimp as Micheal Knight in Knight Rider:  (1982-1986)

Hey, what guy wouldn't want to drive around in a self-aware, indestructible bitchin' black car with a cylon eye, a boost button and a stuffy British personality like C-3P0?

Well, okay, maybe if you replaced the car's personality with that of Julie Benz, then it would be perfect...  

Between 1982 to 1987 if you had a problem, if no-one else would help, and if you could find them, maybe, just maybe, with a miracle, you might, if you were really, really lucky, be able to hire (if you were nice to them)... The A-Team:

Although for the life of me I have no idea why you would want to hire these clowns.  Collectively they had worst aim than Special Edition Greedo or the entire animated cast of G.I. Joe. 

And talk about the law of diminishing returns: as goofy as the show was during it's first season, it got progressively sloppy and moronic as time wore on.  I seem to remember a stunt during the fifth season which had the A-Team going over a ramp in a jeep, crashing and then tumbling over a few times.

The dummy used to represent Mr. T was white. 

And who could forget V? (1983)

This was indispensable viewing back in the day.  Originally inspired by It Can't Happen Here, the Sinclair Lewis novel warning of a hypothetical fascist takeover in the United States, Kenneth Johnson's gritty and contemporary first-draft script was rejected by the network because it was (*GASP!*) "too cerebral".

So, Johnson substituted real-life fascists for extraterrestrial, man-eating lizards to take advantage of the 80's sci-fi boom and the rest, as they say, is history.

I gotta tell ya, when Marc Singer's Mike Donovan sneaks into the alien ship in the first mini-series, gets into a scrap with a Visitor and his opponent's face falls off to reveal a giant iguana underneath, a fuse in my brain kinda burnt out.

V and it's follow-up mini-series served as a tremendous warning reminder of Nazi trappings.  The uniforms, symbolism, youth programs, information control, collaborators, propaganda broadcasts, and systemic persecutions were all hoisted up as symptoms of a sick society.
 
Regrettably original scribe Kenneth Johnson was alienated (no pun intended) from the project over a budget battles with the network when it came time to shoot the sequel miniseries V: The Final Battle (1984).  He had no input at all by the time V: The Series came along, and lemme tell ya, it shows.   Pee-yew!  The only good thing about the series was the presence of Michael Ironside.  He was totally bad-ass, yo.


I've given the re-make/re-imagining a whirl and I think it's brilliantly updated to reflect our times.  Instead of it being a dissertation of external fascism and race relations, the new incarnation of V has a lot of interesting things to say about our blind faith in authority figures who we assume have society's best interests in mind.  The show seems to be telling us that there are a lot of concealed, real-life reptiles out there growing nice and fat off of our ignorance and apathy.  Just watch the documentary Inside Job and you'll know what I'm talking about.

Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994)

It's hard to believe that it took nearly twenty years for a new iteration of Star Trek to hit the small screen.  Although destined to succeed the first couple of seasons under Gene Roddenberry's direct guidance were pretty poopy.  In retrospect that inaugural season is rife with the sort of cheese that hobbled many of the worst episodes of the original series.

Nevertheless, by the early-Nineties, the show had hit it's stride and everybody on our floor in residence tuned in every week to watch the new episode.  It wasn't perceived as a geeky thing back then, everybody liked this show.  We couldn't wait until the following week and would often spend days discussing the minutia or implications of every new episode.

Having said that, if you re-watch it now, it could be argued that there were a lot more crap episodes then good, but the good stuff was really friggin' awesome.

Some people thought that it packed it in too soon.  Many thought that the writers had gotten a real handle on the characters and plot threads and it certainly shouldn't have segued into a series of mainly forgettable films.

But sometimes it's wise to shuffle off stage versus being dragged off.  Just ask Danny Williams.
  
Here's an early promotional clip hyping the premiere of the debut episode:

Now, it wasn't always so serious with me.  If I have any sense of humor at all (a point, I'm sure, which is still up for debate), it's due to these memorable shows.

Three's Company  (1977-1984)

Although most of the scenarios were completely moronic, the comedic timing of Joyce DeWitt, Suzanne Somers, Norman Fell, Audra Lindley, Richard Kline, Don Knotts and the late, great John Ritter made this show greater than the sum of it's naughty parts.  I didn't really understand all of the sexual innuendo at age seven, but I loved the pratfalls and generally goofy behavior of supposed adults.

Threes Company Episode 1
Uploaded by Paulleahs. - See more comedy videos.

The Carol Burnett Show (1967-1978)

Although the skits could be uproariously funny in and of themselves, it was Tim Conway and Harvey Corman trying to bust each other up during the show's life tapings that resulted in maximum hilarity.

The first time I watched the following skit I nearly laughed myself into a hernia when Tim Conway tells the story about the wife he lost in Hawaii at the 5:50 mark:

"Good luck ham" = Win.   

And here's my favorite sitcom of all time: W.K.R.P. in Cincinnati (1978-1982)

Why did I love this show so much and continue to love it to this day?  Simply put, I don't think any sitcom before or since has been nearly this slick, sly and true to it's subject matter.  I hate sitcoms like Friends and Will and Grace that constantly batter the audience with one-liners, bòn móts and innuendo like we're all kids with attention deficit disorder.  With W.K.R.P. the humor came organically from the character interaction and story lines and often built up to a gut-busting crescendo.     

For example, the episode "The Painting" in which slimy sales manager Herb Tarlek purchases a work of art for all the wrong reasons and then spends the entire show trying alternately to unload it or buy it back again, is a hilarious morality tale that the Bard himself would have been proud of.

As a side note, I also patterned my entire wardrobe, personality and ethos in High School after the teachings of Johnny Fever.  Hey, it was a noble pursuit.  After all, he was a Doctor!  

A word for truth in advertising: although I posted a link below to the first season on DVD, the thing is pretty awful.  Since it would have cost a fortune to license the original music, the DVD was released without the original artist's tunes, removing the show's character, crippling it's realism and even making some scenes nonsensical.

Man, it doesn't make any sense to me to make licensing music so friggin' expensive.  If I were a musician, I'd be thrilled have one of my tunes included in a classic T.V. show DVD release.  It's free promotion, fer Chrissakes!    

Morons.

Y'know, sad to say but there was a point in time in my life when I lived for Thursday night's "Must See T.V.".
It usually started with Family Ties: (1982-1989)

Why is my brain hardwired so that I can recite the names of the entire cast of Family Ties yet I can't even remember my online banking password?

In many ways Family Ties was a typical 80's sitcom, but it also had the cajones to tackle some serious issues.  Like when a certain future Academy Award winning actor made an appearance as Elyse's alcoholic brother Ned in a few episodes:

Cheers (1982-1993) was also great during it's heyday.

I can credit an episode of this show for my disproportionate knowledge regarding a certain former Eastern Bloc nation:

No slight to Woody Harrelson, but, man, I loved Coach.

Similarly I was there when both Selma Diamond and Florence Halop died within three seasons of each other on Night Court (1984 -1992).  Finally the producers of the show decided not to hedge their bets any longer and retained thirty-two-year-old Marsha Warfield as a replacement bailiff.  After all, having to acknowledge death in a sitcom not once but twice certainly put the brakes on the ole' yuk-train.

Here's the funky theme song intro:

John Larroquette's Dan Fielding was perhaps the most reprehensible character in an 80's sitcom, an unrepentant ripe bastard who's very presence was a refreshing change from most of the non-threatening, underwritten and saccharine automatons that populated 90% of the T.V. shows of the time.

Here's a bit of little-known Larroquette lore.  In addition to playing the Klingon Maltz in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock:

 John also provided the intro voice-over for the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre:

One last Night Court/Star Trek crossover.  See if you recognize this morose mother-f#@$%^:

And who could forget The Cosby Show (1984-1992)?  In the early goings this had some genuine moments of wit and edge.   

Check the 7:45 mark of the Pilot Episode and you'll instantly be reminded of why this show was so great:

Y'know, when I was a teenager I wasn't above procuring a giant bag of potato chips ( "Look out, they're ruffled!"), a keg of dip and a two-liter of Coke and nestling into a recliner to watch Much Music's fifth or sixth broadcast of Woodstock.  I loved the history captured here in video amber: The Who, Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix are all preserved in suspended animation at the height of their powers.

Oh, and the occasional appearance of naked, mud-covered hippy chicks didn't hurt the viewing experience either.  



And then there was this Cosby-killer and cultural smart-bomb The Simpsons (1989-present).  

During the first eight seasons or so, The Simpsons was a hilarious show that just to happened to be animated. It's also odd to describe an animated show as well directed, but it was.  At first it employed an amazing  repertoire of visual nods to other shows and films and seemed to avoid broad and obvious jokes.  It's been on for so long now that it's moved away from character-driven plots and has degenerated into a wacky cartoon sitcom version of itself. 

It isn't the worst thing on T.V., but man, do I miss the subversive and cock-eyed sense of humor that characterized those earlier years.   

It also amazes me how much of a whipping post The Simpsons was for religious and parental watchdog group that thought it was mental nitroglycerin for kids.  It's because of this show's groundbreaking efforts that lesser programs like Family Guy (which is ten times worse for content) basically gets a free controversy pass nowadays. 

By the time I hit university, my floormates often used me as a walking, talking T.V. Guide.

"So, Dave, what's good on Tuesday nights?"

"Hmmmm, in think ABC is your best bet tonight.  How early you start is gonna depend on how much you can tolerate Tony Danza and how hot you think Alyssa Milano is.  You've got Who's the Boss at eight, The Wonder Years at eight-thirty and then Roseanne at nine.  But for the love of god, get the f%$#^ out of there after that unless you're a huge fan of Coach and eeeeesssh, thirtysomething."

Yeah, you could say I watched a lot of T.V.

But something happened to me when I was about twenty-five.  After encountering some more sophisticated  forms of entertainment (good books, independent films) the lure of the boob tube wore off for me.  I looked back on some of the dreck I'd watched and lamented on how I could have better spent that time doing more productive things.

So, for many years I wrote off network television as a giant waste of time.

But, as a famous man once said...



EPIC:
 

ALSO EPIC:




FAIL: This was nearly as bad as Small Wonder.  That theme song alone is enough to send a body into a diabetic coma...

Obligatory Halloween Post

Greetings, Boils and Ghouls!

Well, 'tis the season when you can't help but ruminate on all things scary and I thought I'd look back on the things that have given me a serious case of the wiggins over the years.

The first time I remember being terrified of something was when I was about six or seven years old.  It happened after a trip to the Bill Lynch traveling fair.  Now, I know that carnivals can be scary just due to the genetic casualties who run and repair the Spanish Inquisition-style torture equipment that passes for amusement rides, but the source of my terror was incidental.

My Dad had won game of ring toss game and the "prize" was a green and black felt head shot of Frankenstein's monster.  I tried to put on a brave face and told my Dad how "cool" I thought it was.  When we got home, he put up on the wall opposite my bed.

Well, that was all well and good until the lights went out.  Turns out that f#$@%^ glowed in the dark.  All night I stared at that baleful visage and thought it was the face of my inevitable doom.  I must have been a pretty sheltered kid since this was the first time I recall seeing something so pregnant with the insinuation of death and horror. 

All night long my mantra was: 

"Can't sleep, Frankenstein'll kill me.  Can't sleep, Frankenstein'll kill me.  Can't sleep, Frankenstein'll kill me."

Next day I was so tired I nearly fell forward into my Rice Krispies.  My folks confronted me and I tabled my theory very calmly that the poster on my wall intended to murder me in my sleep.  They took it down and put it away, much to my relief.

But this moment was watershed.  My parents had done such a good job taking care of me, it was the first time I'd really felt a primal fear.  It was as if I had been suddenly made aware that there were things in the world both real and imagined I'd been protected from, things that were spawned from dark, sinister and unconventional places.  The thrill of terror, agonizing at the time, now seemed like a rush in afterthought.  I'd survived the process and could look back on it now and feel just a tad stronger.

But fear could come out of left field, when you least expected it.  Not long after I got cold-cocked on, of all things, a sunny Saturday afternoon.  The first of my assailants was, believe it or not, the classic Star Trek episode "The Corbomite Maneuver".  I don't know how many of you Kind Readers out there remember this one so here's a quick summary:

The U.S.S. Enterprise comes across a scout ship in deep space, which looks like a glowing version of those hydrogen molecule models that you used to see in school.  Of course, Kirk goes all aggro on the thing and phasers it into oblivion.  Well, things go from bad to worse when the mother ship shows up, which resembles a ginormous soccer ball with a bunch of Christmas lights stuck on it.  I, like many other impressionable viewers, watched in rapt fascination as the pilot of this mammoth vessel opened up a ship-to-ship conference call with the Enterprise and this is what we saw on the view screen:

Some fuse in my brain burned out when they revealed this thing for the first time.  All I could think was "RED ALERT!  RED ALERT!  FIRE ALL PHASERS!  DAMN THE PHOTON TORPEDOES!  KILL IT!!!  KILL IT!!!"

Well, as it turns out, the alien pilot (named Balok, which was creepy enough in it's own right) is merely a more-intimidating stand in for Ron Howard's freaky older brother Clint:

Y'know how kids usually grow out of their awkward phases?  Well, poor Clint didn't.  He's known, along with folks like Michael Berryman, as one of the more unconventional-looking character actors out there right now.

It's pretty sad when Ron Howard is considered the cute one of the family:

Anyway, when I first saw Balok's true appearance it kinda freaked me out even more.  "Bring back the scary dummy!" I yelled at the screen.  "At least I knew he wasn't real!"

As if my jangled nerved hadn't been through enough that day, the T.V. station I'd been watching decided to segue from the world's scariest Star Trek episode into the world scariest movie.  And what was the title of this magnum opus of fear?

THE GREEN SLIME

That's right, baby, The Green Motherf#@$%^ Slime, yo.  Don't think that sounds scary?  Oh yeah?  Well, watch this trailer and keep a change of Haynes nearby:



Ummmmmm.

Okay, so, in the immortal words of a certain habitually howling SCTV character: "Even Count Floyd wasn't scared of that and I get scared real easy!"

By the way, do ya like the groovy theme song there at the end?  Well, here's the extended dance mix version.  See how far you can get through it before you lose control of your bodily functions...

♫♪"Is it just something in your head?  You'll believe it when you're DEAD! Green Sl-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-me!!!"♪♫ 

All I can say is...Wow.   Y'know, I always thought that the Saw movies might benefit from a country and western theme song...

John Kramer was a civil engineer
Who built a place where addicts had no fear.
One bumped his wife with a door one day
So their baby went away
That's why John Kramer became Jigsaw so they say!  Yee-HAW!!!

Okay, so in retrospect, The Green Slime certainly looks more goofy then scary, but in the mind of a six or seven year old kid it was pretty intense.  In fact, there's a scene where an astronaut goes into a confined space by himself to look for the Green Slime and gets all f#$@%^ up just like Tom Skerritt did in Alien.  To this day I'm convinced that Ridley Scott saw this piece of poo and said: "Yknow if I replace the goofy, tentacled one-eyed blobs with something designed by a borderline insane Swiss surreal artist I'm pretty sure I can scare the piss out of people."

After this one-two punch of unmitigated terror,  I was shaken up at first, but ultimately left exhilarated, like someone proud to have survived the roller coaster at Crystal Palace in Moncton.  In light of the scarcity of home video availability at the time and my complete and utter chicken-shittery over being caught sneaking into "R"-rated movies, I trained myself the only way I could: though monster movie books.

One by one I digested such illuminating titles as Horrors: A History of Horror Movies, The Encyclopedia of Horror, and Everything You Wanted To Know About Monsters (But You Were Afraid To Ask!).  A series of library staples particularly near and dear to my heart were the Crestwood House Monster Series, collected here in this awesome photo:

So, by the time I was eleven or twelve, I knew the real names of horror icons Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff (Bela Blasko and William Henry Pratt respectively), the best method to destroy the vegetable-alien in the original The Thing From Another World (you cook it!) and the pains that Lon Chaney went through to realize his startling makeup as The Phantom of the Opera.

At around the same time an affiliate television channel WLBZ out of Bangor, Maine started a "Midnight Monster Madness"-type show on Saturday night called Weird.  It was through this show that I finally managed to see all the classic Universal monster movies like Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man, The Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Mummy.   

More television fare continued to toughen me up.  The 1982 T.V. movie The Fall of the House of Usher staring Ray Walston and Martin Landau  scared the fertilizer our of me.  This effect was further compounded when I manged to negotiate the ability to stay up late one night to watch a heavily-edited version of Alien on ABC.  Even with half the scenes chopped out and the film barely making any linear sense, it still gave me friggin' nightmares.

Feeling as if I'd been suitably toughened up, I now felt ready to venture back into the terror dome.  Still "bustable" if I went into a video store to rent horror movies I had to wait until one of the pay cable movie networks like "First Choice" decided to have a free trial weekend on Halloween.  In the Fall of 1982 I got my grim wish.  My folks went out for the night and I settled in for a long marathon of good-old fashioned, unedited, no-hold's barred frights.


And soon discovered that I was in w-a-a-a-a-a-y over my head. 

First up was George A. Romero's original Night of the Living Dead.  As the eerie music cued up and the stark black and white scenes established a grim and austere mood I thought: "Cool!  It's just like the old 'Universal' monster movies!  This is gonna be neat!"

For the record, of all the colorful adjectives you can apply to Night of the Living Dead, 'neat' is not one of them.

The film began with Barbra and Johnny, two bickering siblings, who have come to a spooky graveyard to pay respects to their dear, departed mother.  All of a sudden, the two are attacked by a lanky, ghoulish fiend who kills Johnny and then chases after Barbra.  She barely manages to make it to old abandoned farmhouse and barricades the door.  She then ventures upstairs and, to her horror and mine, finds a half-eaten corpse, which the film-makers helpfully show us in wince-inducing close up.

More survivors appear.  They barricade the house for a brief moment of respite, find a television set and this is what they see:

'Whoa!' I thought to myself.  'Dead bodies are coming back to life with a taste for human flesh?  Even a resurrected loved one will want to nibble on your elbows?  And you have to shoot them in the friggin' head to kill them?  Man, this is gonna get a lot worse before it gets better..."

And boy, did it ever.  Much worse.  When a plan to get gas into an abandoned truck goes horribly amiss and a pair of the characters die in the resulting explosion, the zombies rip into the vehicle and partake in a little, shall we say, human fricassee.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing.  A terrible thought dawned on me: 'Oh my god, the guy who made this movie is obviously insane.  He's actually showing these zombies...*URK!*...eating people!'

I was horrified.  If Romero was willing to flat-out break the taboo of cannibalism on screen, what the hell else was he willing to subject us to over the next forty minutes? 

And Romero, the mad genius that he is, actually trumped himself not once, but twice more in Night of the Living Dead.  I'd already been slapped in the face by the movie.  But when the sick  little girl dies, then gets back up and kills her own mother with a garden trowel, I felt like I'd been thrown down a flight of stairs.  Then, as if my wits hadn't been abused enough, Romero throws on a brutal shock ending that is, in essence,  the equivalent of someone in jackboots coming down to the foot of those steps and kicking me in the gourd.

I had no idea cinema could be that nihilistic, that devoid of scruples and so cruelly terrifying.  Unlike the reasonably innocent frights provided by the monster movies from the 30's and 40's, Night of the Living Dead  was refusing to play nice.

I fought the temptation to whimper and shut off the T.V., but up next was Poltergeist. I decided to stick it out since I'd heard good things. 

'Okay," I thought to myself, 'I can handle this.  It's just a PG-rated Steven Spielberg movie.  Probably like a horror film with training wheels.'

Well, for the first third of the film, I was right.  I was lulled into a false sense of security with the ample humor and familiar scenes of Spielbergian-flavored suburban bliss. In fact, for quite some time, it played out like the evil twin of E.T. which had come out earlier that same year. 

But then when you least expect it, Poltergeist takes off the kid gloves and starts hammering you with loads of eerie lore, ghostly manifestations, and EEK!-worthy scenes with the inherently creepy Zelda Rubinstein.  

And then this happened:  

"No fair!" I yelled at the screen.  "You can't show maggots and some dude ripping off his friggin' face in a movie rated PG!  You just can't!"        


Next up was the remake of Cat People, but I was too far gone.  In retrospect, that's kind of a shame since Nastassia Kinski spends huge tracts of time strolling around in the film sans clothing.  Idiot.

So, I shut off the T.V. and then proceeded to turn on every light in the house.

It was obvious at that point in time that I still had a long way to go before I could call myself a horror movie maven.  I also knew there would be sterner tests to come, but also more rewarding chills. 

But that is a tale for another Halloween!

Have a good BOO!-Day and stay safe, peoples!  

EPIC:


FAIL:  Maybe I shoulda started here: http://www.esquire.com/the-side/feature/top-ten-horror-movies-list-102809