Patrick McGoohan died Tuesday. He is probably best known as captured agent Number Six in the enigmatic TV series The Prisoner and in scores of movies, including Braveheart and Ice Station Zero, and TV series, Danger Man and Rafferty, using playing intelligent and well bred characters.
Ricardo Montalban died Wednesday. He is usually remembered as the mysterious Mr. Roarke on the original Fantasy Island and as Khan in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. He also worked in various TV projects and movies and was a vocal advocate for acting roles for persons of Spanish-speaking origin.
Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, the First Lady of Star Trek, passed away earlier today after a battle with leukemia which was diagnosed earlier this year. She is best known as Nurse Chapel who pined for Mr. Spock in the original Star Trek series and as Lwaxana Troi in Star Trek: The Next Generation. She also was in the original pilot of the original series, The Cage, and voiced the computer in the later incarnations of Star Trek, including the new Star Trek movie.
She is survived by her son Eugene “Rod” Roddenberry Jr. who, with her friends, accompanied her in her last hours.
Notice: This contains some spoilers so don’t read this post if you intend to see the special at a later date.
I was watching the Muppet Christmas special , A Muppet Christmas: Letters to Santa, last night with my son (who only caught the last half of the special) with great hope that this would be a return to the old wacky days of the Muppets when they could draw laughs with slapstick comedy, bad jokes, and sight puns while still tugging at the heartstrings.
One of these days I going to learn not to get my hopes up.
Something was lacking in the special. It had all of the right stuff, Brian Henson involved and doing a voice, songs by frequent collaborator Paul Williams writing the music (and playing an elf), big name stars (Uma Thurman as a very sexy Joy, Jane Krakowski as the mom, Muppet guest alum Whoopi Goldberg as a cab driver, Nathan Lane as airport security officer Meany, Tony Sirico and Steve Schirripa as, what else, mobsters, and Richard Griffiths (Uncle Vernon from the Harry Potter movies). The acting was okay, on par with what is usual for a Muppet special (or for the series for that matter). The actors seem to be having fun with the roles. The special effects were no worse than you would expect from a television or Muppet special. There just seemed to be no life in the special. I know we can’t replace Jim Henson and we shouldn’t try, but they have proven that the Muppets can go on beyond Jim, take note that the marvelous The Muppet Christmas Carol was a wonderful movie and is considered a modern Christmas classic was made after Jim died.
I just don’t know. Maybe it is the Disney taint that is lobotomizing the talent. The story seems overly plagued by filler with too many situations just tacked on the keep the running time up to an hour. The whole security guard thing was cute, but it shouldn’t have delayed the Muppets from catching the plane (to the North Pole no less) and forcing a gratuitous scene on the wing of the plane.
I guess maybe I was too busy drooling over how hot Uma Thurman was in that white outfit.
Pats, Giants, 17-14. What a crap fest! You know a football game is going to suck when one team has the ball for almost 10 minutes and scores only 3 points. Item two of suckage: The scoring happens in the first quarter (okay, 3 seconds into the second quarter) and the fourth quarter. It looked more like a game played during pre-season.
The commercials… maybe two or three were good, but the rest pretty much were a pain to watch. I liked the Bridgestone tire commercial with Alice Cooper and Richard Simmons (swerving at the last possible moment to miss Richard out of a guilty conscience), the Coke Macy Christmas parade balloons, and the FedEx pigeons ( for originality). An no, I don’t consider the kick-arse Iron Man trailer a commercial in the same sense.
Now Tom Petty was pretty good in a mini-concert way. I mean, how can you mess up with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers? Maybe it should have been the other way around – Tom Petty in concert with a 15 minute Super Bowl game.
Did anyone else seem to have problems with the viewing screen during the broadcast? I noticed that the announcers were too "red" in the face and the graphics in the commercials were cut-off on the left side. I have a HD/digital TV in the room we were viewing the game and switching from widescreen, to movie, to sidebar, and to full screen did not help with the cut-off graphics. I checked the TV with the other channels and none of them had the color or cut-off problems.
I guess by now you’ve all seen the two latest Burger King commercials. The first in the new wave that featured the return of the Burger King himself was a disturbing, low tone commercial “Wake Up With the King” about the Double Croissan’wich. That has got to be the most bizarre commercial I’ve ever seen. If I’d seen this plastic headed monstrosity wake up next to me I’d been screaming and running, especially after he reached back. For all I know he could be some psycho masked killer reaching for a hacksaw.
On par with this commercial is the latest BK commercial about the Tendercrisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch. It features Darius Rucker (lead singer for Hootie and the Blowfish… he is not Hootie!) singing a song based on Big Rock Candy Mountain while dressed as a cowboy ala Sheriff Bart of Blazing Saddles. The commercial looks almost like a porn movie. The guys are all chiseled and the women are all made up, busty, and revealing. Everything just screams of a surreal porno. The cast includes beautiful model/host “Wild On” Brooke Burke, exotic model Vida Guerra, lovely Dallas Cheerleader Monica Cravinas and two other Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, possibly the Sorell twins (Annie Sorell and Alicia Lorén), and who appears to be porn star Jenna Jameson (warning: link to adult content). The whole thing reminds me of a Gap commercial gone wild.
And I can’t help but watch it. It must be all the psuedo-porn in the commercial.
You can tell how mature I am… I enjoy Fairly Odd Parents! I don’t know what it is about that show, but I get a kick out of very episode.
Okay, I do know why I like the show. It is fast pace, funny, whimsical, and unpredictable. I especially like Cosmo. It is not hard to like a blooming idiot. I just wonder how in Fairy (FAIRIES!) World did Cosmo get his wand. He had to pass Fairy (FAIRIES) school, so he must have some brains… or did Wanda help him out. But then Wanda isn’t a rocket scientist with some of the tihngs she does. Of course there is a whole universe of characters like Wandicimo Magnifico, the hunky fairy that was Wanda’s old boyfriend and Jorgen von Stangle, the Ahnold of fairies that is too macho to wear wings (he wears a jet pack). The whole show is well thought out with a whole universe put into play.
And the Fairly Odd Parents test results are….
You are Cosmo! You’re very stupid (not that THAT’s bad! =D)
And yes, I have a Cosmo (turns into a bug) and a Wanda (turns into a star) changing dolls. I’m gonna pick up a Timmy later this week.
Cosmo: “Anger! Quit beating up happiness! Fear! Get out from under the bed! Pride! Jealousy! Quit arguing over who loves love more! Oh great, bravery’s on the roof again!”
I was watching The Discovery Channel *yawn* last night and caught the new *yawn* episode of MythBusters. The episode was *yawn* about yawning, butter toast landing, and *yawn* toy car races. They had the gall *yawn* to start off with a test of the contagion of *yawn* yawning. I could have told you *yawn* that was true. But the experiments were *yawn* interesting to watch. I really liked the *yawn* experiment on wether toast lands butter side down. It has been *yawn* my experience that toast almost always lands butter side down. They however found that it is *yawn* equally likely to land unbuttered side. And the toy car experiment was cool. They *yawn* matchbox car along side a Viper to see which is faster in a quarter mile. The MysthBuster team *yawn*came up with some very interesting results.
Has anyone noticed how cute is Kari Byron, one of the interns on the show. She has the most gorgeous smile. Now Scottie Chapman(I love her tattoos) and Christine Chamberlain are two nice looking young women as well. How do Adam and Jamie get so luck to have such attractive women to work with them? *yawn*
As you probably know by now, BBC has brought back Doctor Who and it will be premiering sometime next year on BBC 1. The BBC website hast posted a teaser trailer. Yes, let us in the United States get all excited over a a snippet of film and there are no plans to distribute in the U.S.! It will probably be in 2007 before we get a glimpse of the show and them probably only through pirated episodes.
BBC, I would be happy to get the shows on BBC-America six months after they air in England.
I guess it is time to dig out my Doctor Who episodes (what few I have) and satisfy myself that way.
Unless you have been living under a rock, you know there has been a lot of hub-bub about SciFi Channel‘s re-imaging of Battlestar Galactica. There are as many nay-sayers as there are proponents of the change and the mini-series had not even aired. If you haven’t been one of the uber-million viewers that caught the two-parter in the past two nights then you have a chance tonight to view part two of the saga at 7pm EST. My advice is to wait until Sunday at 7pm to catch all four hours of the mini-series because there is a great deal of vital information in the first two-hours that you would be lost without.
I will warn you now, the following review has a boat load of spoilers in it. Don’t read it if you do not wish to know some of the more secret details.
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Greatest Hits by Bob Seger