Archive for the 'Cathode Rays' Category
Getting Gay with Kids Is Here
June 14th, 2007Another embedded video to share because I’m too lazy to write anything substantial, I know, but this one’s a real kitschy gem. Back in 1986, NBC celebrated its 60th anniversary with an all-star special which somehow escaped my notice back then. The clip below showcases Nell Carter, Bea Arthur and others (Punky Brewster!) singing “Family” […]
Clay Pigeons (And Other Critters)
June 6th, 2007Did anybody see the Americanized Creature Comforts on CBS? Did anything in that preceding sentence make sense? I’m a huge fan of the UK edition of this program, along with pretty much anything Nick Park/Aardman does, so personally this was a genuine treat. For those unfamiliar with C.C., they take the recordings of real people […]
Cheap Thrill: Joan Crawford on The Sixth Sense
June 4th, 2007Here at Chez Scrubbles we’ve been getting a few jollies from a new channel that popped up on our DirecTV lineup earlier this year — Chiller. Chiller broadcasts lots of heavily edited ’80s vintage fright flicks, but constant repeats of Friday the 13th: The Series, Tales from the Crypt and shows of that ilk form […]
Goodbye Charlie
May 31st, 2007Charles McNulty of the L.A. Times remembers Charles Nelson Reilly, drawing parallels between Reilly and Paul Lynde and going into his considerable theatrical career. As a child, I had an intense liking of Reilly on Match Game and Lynde on Hollywood Squares. Years before I had any inklings on what being gay meant, these two […]
Boob Tubing
May 17th, 2007It always happens to me. The major TV networks have all announced their Fall schedules, and the two new shows we chose to watch — Jericho and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip — have both gotten the axe.
Actually, Jericho was more Christopher’s show and I just went along for the ride; its lousy but […]
Rhapsody in Felt
May 8th, 2007Muppet Newsflash has the goods on the upcoming Muppet Show Season Two DVD box, set for release in August. One thing the post doesn’t mention is whether the “Muppet Morsels” from the season one box will also be used on this one. I hope so. Pop-up factoids are rare on TV show season sets, and […]
The Year We Made Contact
May 4th, 2007This trippy animated segment from PBS’s 3-2-1 Contact really wowed me as a kid. I used to watch these every day after school and (geek alert) draw pictures and write about the topics covered. Even after hours I was a good little student, damnit! Interestingly, the initial batch of sixty five 3-2-1 episodes were repeated […]
Mise en Scène
May 2nd, 2007Been watching a lot of movies lately:
The Best of Youth (2003; DVD) — Not strictly a film but a six-hour Italian miniseries brought to two DVDs. This saga of two brothers’ intertwining lives from the 1960s onward takes a while to get into, but once it gets going one is rewarded with an absorbing story […]
The Sunny Side of Sad
April 20th, 2007This morning I was having my usual idle TV watching session and was disappointed to find that Turner Classic Movies replaced their longstanding “Sunny Side of Life” movie intros with a more generic intro showing contemporary footage of morning commuters, pigeons and tall buildings. Yawn. This was inevitable, since the channel’s previously chaotic on-air visual […]
What a Relief It Is
April 12th, 2007Watching the Discovery Channel’s Planet Earth makes me wish we had an HD-equipped television. It looks nice enough on a regular 36-inch flat screen, however.
Last weekend, we caught the latest two installments on our tiny 12-inch Sanyo backup television. As usual we were wowed by the gorgeous photography and the unprecedented footage of unusual […]
Lananeeneenoonoo’s Greatest Hit
April 1st, 2007Watched this one over the weekend and hoped it was on YouTube - and here it is. Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders’ hilarious parody of Bananarama came from their 1988 Christmas special. The B-ladies get a savage treatment, but apparently they liked the skit so much that they put French and Saunders (along with actress […]
Dumb and Dumber
March 15th, 2007A couple of articles to make you question the intelligence of Americans - first up the L.A. Times has a piece on how TV games shows have gotten progressively easier over the last decade or so. A depressing read which reminded me of how much my own family absolutely adores Deal or No Deal. Granted […]
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Oscars 2007
February 26th, 2007Good — Nice distribution of prizes with no one film hogging the honors; Naomi Watts’ lovely yellow gown; Melissa Etheridge’s surprise win; the classiness of Helen Mirren; montages clips that didn’t look like they came off someone’s third-generation VHS tape.
Bad — Ellen’s inoffensive, unedgy patter; Beyoncé and Eddie Murphy not clapping for Alan Arkin; too […]
100 Favorite Moments In Television Revisited
February 22nd, 2007I’ve updated an old scrubbles page — 100 Favorite Moments In Television, a reprint of an article which appeared in the short-lived pop culture magazine Egg in 1991. When I first put this together back in 2003, I didn’t notice that a few missing pound symbols in the page’s HTML code resulted in a screwy […]
Great Lost TV Theme: Probe/Search
February 18th, 2007Every so often I have a mini-obsession with certain tracks in my iTunes library. Lately it’s been composer Dominic Frontiere’s theme from Probe, a made for TV movie which served as the pilot for the series Search. From what I can gather, Search was a technology-based caper series in the Mission Impossible vein. It ran […]
