Elmo and Ricky Gervais

[Via Boing Boing]
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I just watch it for the commercials

Substitute some big broadcast for "it" in the headline above. That's about the only times I ever watch commercials on television. Still, some of them are rather creative, and there is a set of awards, the Clios, to acknowledge the best. Here's 2012's big winner:



I originally saw this on Slate, where the point was made that, cute pigs in a machine versus cute pigs in the open air, they're still making burritos out of them...

For the full sense of the awards, of which there are many, check out the Clio website. It's like watching the Superbowl without all that pesky football to distract you from the main business.
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So, we like the Beach Boys

You gonna fault us for that? Watch this:

Beach Boys Perform New Song on 'Fallon'

If the whole album is like this, they've really done it. And here's more from the show, if you're interested.
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Must See TV

I can remember watching television in the 70s. There was one big block, Saturday nights on CBS. MASH, All in the Family, Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart. If you were home on Saturday night, you watched these. You'd be crazy not to. And keep in mind, there were no VCRs then, much less DVRs and Netflix and Hulu. You watched what was on, and that was the end of it.

Those shows marked a golden age that wasn't repeated until NBC conquered Thursday night in the 90s. Cheers, Friends, Seinfeld, ER. Must see TV, they called it.

Warren Littlefield was the President of NBC Entertainment in the 90s, and he's out on the circuit pushing an oral history of the shows of Must See TV. You might have caught him on the radio or TV, talking about it. The Atlantic has a major interview by Kevin Fallon. Take the genesis of Will and Grace for instance, a show that might have a hard time getting on the air in 2012.

Management said, "What the hell are you doing? Why are you developing Will and Grace?" It's network television, and we have advertisers to answer to. Advertisers are not ready to embrace, at the core of a show, a relationship between a gay man and straight woman. What are you doing? To make matter worse, we're in business with these writers. We own them. They're under a deal to our company. So it's not like you're wasting somebody else's time and money. You're wasting ours.

Very inside baseball, but worth a read. The Death of Must See TV: A Former Executive on NBC's Rise and Fall.
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Trebek for $100

Alex Trebek has been monitoring the answers (i.e., questions) on Jeopardy for 28 years, which makes him one of the icons of television. There are a few other folks who go on, reliably delivering their material again and again, but not many. And even fewer come across quite as smart.

Spoiler alert: Trebek already knows the answers (i.e., questions).

Profiling Trebek, Dan Zak at WaPo doesn't exactly rake through the dirt. There is no dirt. Trebek is not a Jekyll and Hyde, is not a secret high-lifer, and appears to be exactly the same onstage or off. And let's face it. Onstage he's not exactly a house a'fire. But he's not supposed to be. He's the man with the answers (i.e., questions).

[He] remains apart, behind a lectern near a wall of flat-screen TVs. He is also cordial and sedate. He is the host of the show. He cracks few jokes. He hugs no one. He wears suits in gray and navy. He announces categories and reads clues and says “Right” or “Correct” or “Yes” and, sometimes, “No.” He has all the answers, which means he knows all the questions. He used to stand behind the lectern but now he sits. He used to have a mustache but now he doesn’t.

That almost completely sums him up. Except he likes to read Immanuel Kant in his spare time. Immanuel Kant??? Maybe he does know all the answers. And all the questions, for that matter.

Jeopardy is the show we like to watch to feel smart. If you want to feel smart for reading a web article, check out Alex Trebek, thinking deep after 28 seasons of ‘Jeopardy!’ (By the way, halfway through we had to log in via Facebook to continue reading. We were not harmed in the process.)
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The Newsroom

Ten to one if you're reading this you're an Aaron Sorkin fan, and you're going to want to watch The Newsroom when it hits the airwaves. You already know it's coming, and you're just tapping your foot, waiting.

Here's a piece from Vanity Fair to tide you over. It includes the line, “I’m pretty wordy when I write,” Sorkin said.

Really?

Have at it: The Sorkin Way.

And a little bonus, an interview following The Social Network:

3D

There's something about 3D that Grinwout's finds intrinsically uninteresting. Oh, it's fine for a gimmick, but when push comes to shove, it just isn't all that great. First of all, there are plenty of people who can't watch 3D movies without getting a headache, and others whose vision is such that they can't even see it. Under the best of circumstances, let's admit it, it isn't all that good, which doesn't help. There's a lack of naturalness to the visuals you're seeing, and it can keep you from enjoying the movie. The funny thing is, while we can watch a black-and-white film and immediately accept its reality, with 3D, which is geometric progressions more "real," it feels less real. On top of that, you have to pay a premium for 3D movies in the theaters.

And now TVs are coming out in 3D. The ultimate promise is that we won't need special glasses some day. My question is, do I have to? Can't I just skip this so-called innovation? My mind works pretty well with black-and-white movies, and I can't once remember thinking to myself, if that had only been in color... Come to think of it, remember colorization? Casablanca in living, breathing imitation Technicolor? Bleeeech!

David Bordwell explains why this is happening the way it is, going back to 2005, when James Cameron and George Lucas were touting 3D as the coming thing to theater owners, and warning them to get with the program. Now Cameron is back, and he's doing it again!

Having pressured exhibitors to go digital and 3D, Cameron is now asking them to change their equipment to permit him to shoot in a new way he likes better—and to compensate for a deficiency in the 3D system he thrust on them. But he assures them that revamping their projectors is merely a matter of “little tweaks . . . tiny things that make it better.” He has claimed it’s a matter of a software upgrade... You have to give Cameron credit for chutzpah.

Are we being Luddites about this whole thing? Is someone about to take the colorized version of Casablanca and release it in 3D because otherwise, how could we possibly enjoy it?

The future is still unclear, perhaps. To understand the present better, read It’s good to be the King of the World..
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Quick take - End of civilization as we know it

Shame on you, America: 'Keeping Up With the Kardashians' Gets 3 More Seasons.
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In defense of My Little Pony

MLP is not new. The toy—always the toy comes first—was introduced in the early 80s, originally as My Pretty Pony. Whatever. They were colorful, they came with accessories, and they were marked with symbols on their flanks. Their target audience of little girls ate them up. They hit the TV and movie screens in the mid 80s. Somewhere in the 90s they all galloped off into the sunset, and we figured we'd never see them again.

We were wrong.

According to Wikipedia, Grinwout's source for all things related to MLP, we are now in the fourth generation of ponydom. Normally this would escape the notice of most adults without young children, except that this time out MLP has spawned the notorious Bronies, grown men fans who—while presumably living in their parents' basements when they're not trying to figure out what kind of work they're out of—are eating them up.

Todd VanDerWerff, while not necessarily standing up for the Bronies per se, does stand up for the present TV show, which he claims is the best program available for today's kids:

What’s wrong with telling our kids that there’s nothing more wonderful than the moment when someone says they’ll love you forever, even if that’s an impossibility, given who we are? What’s wrong with telling them that doing good things is something that will have impact far beyond yourself and your immediate friends and neighbors? And what’s wrong with believing in these things just a little bit yourself?

Forget about Bronies. Or better yet, incorporate them into your thinking. Check out VanDerWerff's article on The A.V. Club.
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Come on baby, let's do the twist

I watch this video, and I feel as if it was recorded on another planet:



When Dick Clark died last week, plenty of people wrote up his story, which in fact was very simple. He was a smart businessman who started out in music and went on to build a fantastic television empire. He wasn't a musician; he just happened to see his chance with American Bandstand, and he took it. Not that he didn't do well with it, but it could just as easily have been a hog auction show, if that's what the traffic would have borne. Not that Clark wasn't, we are sure, a fine fellow. But the teens of the Bandstand era didn't exactly relate to him; it's just that, you didn't not relate to him. He didn't represent the music, but nor did he represent the older generation. He was neutral. Probably anyone who was not neutral couldn't have pulled it off.

What he pulled off is what you see in the Chubby Checker video. Groups came on the show and lip synched. That was the live portion. The rest of it was just listening and dancing to records. What makes Chubby extra interesting is that he doesn't just stand there and mouth the words. He throws in the Twist. Which is why the video feels like it was recorded on another planet, a planet where they had dance crazes that took the nation by storm.

It wasn't all that long ago, folks.

Chubby Checker's reminiscence is at Let's Do the Twist: Chubby Checker Remembers Dick Clark. It seems that it was Clark who invented Chubby Checker, so to speak.

That was some planet!
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"The Closer" for the preschool set

Grinwout's enjoys "The Closer," with Kyra Sedgwick and her L.A. homicide team. We've been catching up with it on disk (because we hardly ever watch anything when it's on; that seems so... common). I'd recommend it to anybody, or at least I thought I would until I saw this video. It's sort of hard to imagine the Venn diagram of people who watch both "The Closer" and "Sesame Street."



Then again, it is pretty funny. And yet another video to watch when we should have been doing something—anything—else. This one was via Criminal Element, which makes the Venn diagram even harder to imagine.
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George Takei

Is George Takei the most interesting veteran of Star Trek? Today's birthday boy (4/20/37) was interned with his family during WWII, he was student body president of his LA junior high school, he was one of the first Japanese actors to build a career in post-war Hollywood, and eventually served as a Lieutenant on the Starship Enterprise on The Original Series. As true connoisseurs know, he was promoted to Captain after TOS ended:



Of course, his greatest fame was from TOS, where he worked with the only other contender for the most interesting Star Trek veteran, a relationship he describes here in his predictably gentlemanly fashion:




As a measure of cool, he's done voice work on everything from Archer to Scooby-Doo to Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Having served both masters, so to speak, he is the voice of reason in the ongoing war between Carrie Fisher and William Shatner on which Star X is best. And he's also a noted advocate of gay rights.

Did we mention he's also one of the funniest people in the universe:



Happy birthday, George Takei.

The worst travelogue ever

Thank you, Dangerous Minds, for digging this one up. Apparently it's quite rare: It was screened before The Life of Brian, but only in theaters in Great Britain and Australia, where boring, groan-worthy travelogues were still being routinely shown prior to feature films. (More details are on the DM site.) I started watching it thinking it was just a bad travelogue, and then you start getting into it, and it gets really bad, and then... Watch it.

Full-scale version of the Starship Enterprise

Imagine a real life-sized version of the Enterprise. Where would you put it? Las Vegas, of course. Farfetched? Not at all. It almost happened.

The “big idea” was building the ship itself at full-scale. That was the main attraction. That being said, we also knew we would have to have some kind of “show” on board. So, conceptually, it was to be a “tour” of the ship, with all of the key rooms, chambers, decks, and corridors that we knew from the movie. There was to be the dining area for the ship’s crew (where you could dine in Star Fleet comfort), and other special features. There were also one or two interesting ride elements that we were considering including a high-speed travelator that would whisk you from deck to deck.

I had no idea that this was ever in the works. The Goddard Group designs all sorts of amusement attractions around the world. Rides, parades, museums, casinos, the whole gamut. Gary Goddard, the founder, previously worked at Landmark Entertainment Group, where he was responsible for Star Trek: The Experience, among others. He's responsible for the quote above. Get the whole story at the Goddard blog.

Via BoingBoing.

Fernwood 2Night

According to Dangerous Minds, Fernwood 2Night shows are hard to come by. It's a shame, really, as this was one of the defining shows of 70s comedy, the sort of postmodern, everything so tongue-in-cheek that it was coming out their ear humor that followed the end of the straight vaudeville turns that we were so used to on television. At that time, a generation of old comics was passing, and a new generation was just beginning to come down the pike. Martin Mull was definitely part of that new generation; he always struck me as one of the funniest people around, no matter what he was doing. And this was the show that brought Fred Willard to the masses:

In a scene-stealing role that defined his entire career playing the clueless white guy—is there ANYONE more Caucasian that Fred Willard?—Willard portrays what is quite possibly the dumbest, most dense character in all of television history. I’ve always thought that Willard was a comedic genius—the obtuse angles of his observations, so off the cuff and spontaneous, so REAL—and he was never funnier than he is in this role.

The first clip in the article, with the race expert, shows Willard at his best. And I couldn't resist extracting the Tom Waits segment above; he's the perfect Fernwood guest. Anyhow, get the whole story, and more clips, at Fernwood 2Night: The Great Lost American Comedy.

The guy who played Data

Whatever happened to Brent Spiner:



Fresh Hell is one of those web series that are popping up nowadays, and having just watched a couple of episodes, we can report that this is goofy, funny stuff. Whether or not the web is the source of all of tomorrow's entertainment, as some would suggest, remains to be seen, but there's good material out there beyond just clips. Vice.com (there's a URL for you) interviewed Spinter recently:

The part and the show was a gift and I am eternally grateful. I’m delighted that other people have opinions and affection for the character. The only thing that bothers me—and it happens all the time—is when people see me and shout, “DATA! DATA”! I’m fine with people recognizing me. I just wish they shouted, “Guy who played Data”!

Check out Off Hollywood - Brent Spiner, and follow his show, Fresh Hell.

The original pitch for the Muppet Show

'Nuff said:

Space Opera

Charlie Jane Anders and Gordon Jackson have put together a great compilation of the highlights of the genre for io9. Some of these books and movies and television shows are personal favorites at Grinwout's. You should know them too.

Major Highlights in the History of Space Opera.

Quick Take - Snow White

IMDB currently lists 91 films and TV shows featuring a character named "Snow White."

Really?

Some of these look amazingly dreadful, especially the deservedly banned "Coal Black." Check out Snow White's Strange Cinematic History.

Say no more, know what I mean?

Eric Idle was born on March 29, 1943. While Grinwout's would normally go out of its way to seek out the obscure and the forgotten, in this particular case we prefer the unforgettable (nudge, nudge).