Category: Idiot Box

The way she goes

The new season of Trailer Park Boys comes out tomorrow! I am super excited! Gonna get some liquor and cheeseburgers and binge that f***er!

I’ve also been slowly working my way through a rewatch of the entire series over the last four months, and I’ve got to say that I’m really finding a deeper appreciation for the first seven seasons. Maybe it’s just because I’ve never gone back to those episodes, but it sort of feels like I’m watching them all for the first time. There is so much stuff that I’d forgotten about, and even the plot structures of each season are much more varied than I’d thought.

I think that a lot of it has to do with the fact that I burned through the initial run of the show via DVDs, so as to catch up with my brothers, who had seen it all already. I wanted to get in on the references, you know? Fact of the matter is that despite the insanely low budgets -maybe even because of the low budgets- the original seven seasons are really good. I miss old Julian, who is much more likeable back then than he is at current (at least on the TPB Podcast). The fact that Bubbles was just a secondary character until season three still blows my mind.

Will I go back and watch all the supplementary material as well? I’ll probably give the movies and specials a go, but I’m not sure I feel the need to revisit the live specials. Out of the Park: Europe will likely get passed over, because while it has its moments, it just doesn’t really feel like Trailer Park Boys. And those green-screened parts are just so darned distracting. If I were to start diving into all the extra content on Swearnet/YouTube… well, that’s a lot of material to watch. So who knows!?

2016 Xmas Gift Roundup!

Oh my, has yet another year passed already? Well, I guess three years if you’re just going by the last time I wrote one of these things. Remember how it used to be an annual tradition? Did I write this exact same intro paragraph last time? Ehh, I’ve already recycled the idea and the banner, might as well re-use some of the text as well.

I think that, for the most part, I stopped doing these because I began to feel embarrassed about all of the stuff I get for Xmas. I mean, it’s not like it’s all that excessive (especially with my lack of wife), but it’s easy to look at these articles and think to myself “gee, I sure am spoiled, aren’t I?” Maybe next year will be the year I finally act on my desire to volunteer somewhere and help those less fortunate.

But probably not. That would also require leaving the house, and my incredible selfishness is a defining character trait.

Continue reading 2016 Xmas Gift Roundup!

Late to yet another party

Netflix has been consistently trying to get me to watch Pacific Heat over the last couple of weeks, popping it into nearly every category as I browse for things to watch. So, I figured, okay. It looks almost exactly like Archer, so I’ll give it a try.

When I finished watching the first episode, I decided that my joke line about the show would be “imagine if Archer wasn’t funny” and I figured that was gold.

Then I Googled Pacific Heat and that was the summary of nearly every result on the first page. It’s even the headline of AV Club’s review. So much for that hilarious little nugget.

I guess, if you were going to take anything away from this post, it’s that you shouldn’t watch Pacific Heat. It’s terrible. I was going to say that it’s even worse than Brickleberry, but AV Club beat me to that as well. Geez.

A stray observation

You know how in some shows, a character will ramble to themselves very specifically about whatever situation they’re in, as a way to tell the audience about what’s going on? I think it’s a pretty common thing, at least in family-friendly cartoons, but I’ve never really thought about it before so I can’t say for sure how prevalent it is.

Lately though, I am finding that it drives me completely bonkers. The “Exposition Monologue” trope, where a character explains their situation to nobody but themselves (and the audience), is a terrible way to shoehorn in some information. It’s very annoying, and really takes me out of whatever I’m watching. Like, I get that you don’t have the time or money to always show everything, but at least throw a second character in there. It’s still obvious, but at least the exposition doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb when one character is explaining the thing to someone else.

Anyway, this little quibble comes up thanks to a notably bad episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003), where the first few minutes are made up of an incredibly annoying character that just keeps chattering to herself. This could have been taken care of in the cold open teaser, but no. And this episode is sandwiched in the middle of the otherwise stellar Season 3, which makes it seem even worse. Oh well. They can’t all be winners.

Final Thoughts on TMNT 1987

A couple weeks ago, I finished watching seasons nine and ten of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. I probably should have been keeping notes on my thoughts, because I knew I’d want to write about them. But I figured I’d get around to doing this sooner, while said thoughts were still in my brain. Alas, now we have some cobbled-together half-memories instead of… you know what, that’s probably about the usual quality level of my writing anyway. It’s fine.

  • Season nine begins where eight left off: with the Technodrome destroyed forever, and Shredder and Krang trapped in Dimension X. Ostensibly, they are stuck there for good. I don’t know how this time is any different from the last time they were stuck there. The Technodrome isn’t host to the only interdimensional portal in existence.
  • So a new recurring villain is introduced: Dregg. He is a spaceman from far off in space and I don’t really recall his origin. The same as Krang, I think; some sort of displaced warlord. It doesn’t matter. He’s dumb-looking and sounds like someone doing a bad Tim Curry impression.
  • The twist for season nine is that Dregg appeals to the people of Earth as a saviour come from space to grant them fantastical technology and rocket them into a glorious future. Only the Turtles know that he’s a no-goodnik, so of course he tells the dumb-dumb humans that the Turtles are the bad guys, and we’ve got that whole X-Men thing from season eight happening again.

Continue reading Final Thoughts on TMNT 1987

Talking about Ninja Turtles: Volume 2

My journey through the entire series of the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon continues. Last time I made a big wall of text about it, I had just finished up the fifth season: the halfway point of the series. Let’s go over some stray observations I have about seasons six through eight.

  • The turtle colour/voice flubs are still out in full force. I would have thought that this was a problem that would have been ironed out by this point, but I think it might actually be getting worse as we move on. At least I’ve been noticing more instances of it. You never see such egregious errors in other cartoons, so I can only imagine that it’s the result of having four characters that look exactly the same.
  • Season six was basically just your normal average season. Though a run of 16 episodes is positively quaint after the massive number of episodes in seasons three and four.
  • The first half of season seven was produced for season four, but held back for whatever reason. So that means that you’re rolling back a couple years worth of animation improvements, and it’s visibly uglier than the latter half of the season.
  • Also, it goes back to using the original intro sequence, which IMO is the better of the two.
  • By this point, Michaelangelo has permanently traded in his nunchaku for a grappling hook. Which I suppose is more useful, but way less cool. And it’s all thanks to those super-lame Europeans who thought nunchucks were too violent.
  • But swords and laser blasters were okay? Get bent, Europe.
  • The first half of season seven also happens to be a hole “TMNT visit Europe” series, which makes for a nice change of pace and allows for a little cultural edutainment, but the stories go to pot. It made sense that when Krang and Shredder were constantly attacking New York, the Turtles would always be there to stop them. But then somehow they always manage to be attacking exactly the European location that the Turtles just happen to be in at the time. Why not attack New York when you know that the Turtles are away in Europe and won’t be there to stop you? Or vice versa? You guys have a teleporter that can take you anywhere. Steal something from anywhere else in the world.
  • It would make way more sense if the Turtles simply faced other villains while on their vacation.
  • The other half of season seven not only goes back to being more visually appealing, but the storylines also get a hack of a lot better than ever before. Well, some of them. The episode where they travel back in time to an ancient Japan where everyone speaks perfect English was a little silly. Overall, though, much better stories.
  • The episode “Invasion of the Krangazoids” shows us a glimpse of what Krang’s true form looks like, when he creates clones of himself that evolve into giant reptilian monsters. But it also made me consider that it doesn’t make any sense that Krang’s brain was removed from his body as a punishment for his war crimes. It’s more than I want to type out, but just think about it a bit for yourself. No wonder that’s never mentioned in any other incarnation of the TMNT.
  • Tokka and Rahzar show up in season seven. That’s cool. Except that Rahzar got a significant intelligence boost while Tokka remains kind of a stupid baby.
  • Everything goes way off the rails in season eight. The intro and theme song change. The visual quality improves considerably, but the visual style goes to poop. April gets a new costume. TMNT now wants to be X-Men. It’s crazy. Complete insanity.
  • Let’s start with the intro. The theme song has gone from awesome to some kind of gross 90’s rock abomination. It also seems really long. Or maybe it just feels that way because it’s awful. Oh and also it intercuts footage from the cartoon with footage from the live-action movies. It makes zero sense.
  • And on a separate point, all the cartoon footage is pried out of the episodes, rather than being completely unique animation like the other intros. It’s so lame. I just can’t get over how lame it is.
  • It’s kind of fun that the season is a single long storyline, rather than Shredder’s capers mixed with random other one-off villains.
  • Oh right, X-Men. Channel 6 is now calling the TMNT (all mutants, really) an evil scourge and the people of New York are terrified of them, even though they’re obviously out to do good. Also there is an organization of mutants that are trying to take over and establish mutants as the dominant species. Sound familiar at all?
  • The art is way darker and more detailed, but not as good. I hate the change to the Turtles’ bandannas, specifically. Their more angular appearance isn’t too bad, and makes them look a little more in line with the 2003 TMNT. I mostly just dislike that the New York sky is now constantly reds and purples, and that even the water is rarely ever blue any more. The attitude shift is not selling me, especially since the scripts are still pretty hammy, so there’s a very noticeable mood dissonance.
  • I like April’s new jacket and shoes. So much less garish than the yellow jumpsuit and white boots.
  • I was actually really shocked when Shredder asploded the Channel 6 building. Like, this is a Saturday Morning Cartoon. It’s not supposed to have major events that don’t get magically wiped away at the end of the episode. But it does, and it influences the entire rest of the season. Like I said before, there’s a much higher level of continuity in season eight, to the point where it could almost be a stand-alone mini-series, much like the first season.

I am already aware that things take another sharp turn in season nine, but I don’t know all of the specifics. I guess we’ll just have to start watching and see!

Wherein I go on and on about Ninja Turtles

You all remember the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon from the late 80’s, yeah? Of course you do. Everyone does. Though a few years ago it seemed like it was very en vogue to hate on it because… they used 80’s slang? Man, that’s such a lame complaint, and completely wrong, to boot. The only character who uses excessive slang is Michaelangeo, and it’s surfer slang specifically, because he was characterized as a surfer.

In conclusion, people are stupid.

Anyway, I’ve been watching through each season of classic TMNT lately. Of course, by watching, I mean I have it on in the background while I play Picross or Hyrule Warriors. It’s become something of a pre-bedtime ritual, in fact. My night feels incomplete without an episode or two. While slang isn’t one of them, the show definitely does have its share of problems and other general weirdness. And because I don’t have any more interesting things to write about, here is a list of things that have stood out to me.

  • Starting off with a fairly well-known one, there seem to be a lot of situations where one or more of the voice actors are temporarily replaced. And almost never well. This seems to be most prominent in season three (which has roughly seventeen million episodes), but it does still happen on occasion. I don’t know what the show’s production was like, but I suppose that James Avery (Shredder) and Rob Paulsen (Raphael) were probably in pretty high demand back in the day, and I can understand that maybe they had scheduling conflicts here and there that left them unable to fulfil their TMNT duties in favour of something more lucrative. But were Barry Gordon (Donatello) and Pat Fraley (Krang) really that busy? Even I had to Google them to remember their names.
  • Michaelangelo may be known mostly for his surfer talk, but that’s never bothered me. What does sort of bug me though, is the way he always puts so much emphasis on the word “pizza.” And the way he enunciates both syllables so strongly. It’s not “PEET-ZAH,” it’s “pizza.” It may be a small thing to pick at, but when every second punch line out of Mikey’s mouth relates to pizza, it starts to grate pretty quickly.
  • What is the deal with the Turtles just being “buds” and Splinter nothing more than their sensei? I am not really up on how the relationships were handled in the Mirage comics, but I’ve always appreciated that in subsequent incarnations, Splinter and the Turtles were straight up father and sons, and that their familial bonds were an important part of their characters. It feels so very wrong whenever Splinter calls them “my students” instead of “my sons.”
  • Speaking of Splinter, he is… not so great in this show. In all other TMNT continuities, Splinter is basically the ultimate badass, capable of defeating any and all opponents. Here, I suppose he does still carry a bit of martial arts clout, but he comes off as a lot more old and feeble, and I just don’t care about him as much as I do the more modern Splinters. Even crazy extendo-tail Splinter from the current movie franchise.
  • April’s scream (which I believe they recorded exactly once and then just used forever) is very annoying.
  • Since it’s a current hot topic: the show is definitely on a misogyny see-saw, but leans more on the side of male dominance. April is independent, ambitious, and hard-working. A female character that young girls could really look up to. However, she is constantly getting captured and is basically helpless whenever a villain is around. Irma is exactly the opposite of a good female role model. Kala the Neutrino is probably a fairly capable lady, what with being a rebel fighting against Krang’s forces, but she shows up so seldom (and never on her own) that we don’t know a lot about her other than that she is a hip teenager. That’s basically it for female characters. Very rarely is there is a one-off girl mutant/villain, and usually they are easily manipulated by the men that surround them.
  • The show is very clearly set in New York City, yet no character ever utters the name. It’s always “the city” this and “the city” that. We know that the show is supposed to exist in the real world, as other real locations are mentioned by name, and there are a number of jabs at New Jersey. So it really stands out as strange that they refuse to acknowledge the city’s name.
  • I blame the 80’s entirely for this one, but any music that is not the main theme or a variant of the main theme is so bad. And there is a pool of maybe five or six themes, so you’re constantly hearing the same awful music. Plus one or two commercial break stings that they use in every single episode.
  • Lastly, I found it more than a little grating that every single episode of season 2 and 3 focused on Krang and Shredder trying to find a power source to get the Technodrome out of Dimension X/the Earth’s core. All of them. Many episodes of later seasons use that scheme as well, but they also move away from it to give some screen time to other villains or monsters of the week. Quite frankly, the lack of variety in plots just makes season 3 feel that much longer, and it’s a welcome change when we start going for entire episodes without a Shredder in sight.
  • Actually, it was also annoying that every second episode of season 4 on started with one of the Turtles complaining that “life is so boring without Krang and Shredder around.” Alright, maybe not quite every second episode, but my point stands that they lean on that setup far too often.
  • Shellbacks! Wretched reptiles! Shellbacks! Wretched reptiles! Shellbacks! Wretched reptiles! Shellbacks! Wretched reptiles! Shellbacks! Wretched reptiles! Shellbacks! Wretched reptiles! Shellbacks! Wretched reptiles!
  • Seriously, bad guys… get some new pejoratives.

And that’s about it. To be fair, I’m only just starting season 6, so maybe things will get mixed up a little as we go? Probably not. All I know for sure is that there is a major shift in seasons 8 to 10, so I’m really looking forward to seeing what those are all about. I’m sure I’d seen episodes here and there as a kid, and I know there’s a new main villain, but I honestly don’t remember anything else about late TMNT. It’s gonna be exciting!

Yes, but episodes of what?

I don’t watch TV like most people. In fact, I sort of don’t watch TV at all. I mean, I watch shows, but I watch them exclusively through DVDs or Netflix. I guess most hipsters are the same way. But for me, it’s not because I’m too good for cable, but rather that I’m just too lazy to remember schedules and make sure I’m around when things are on.

Also I generally just watch the same things over and over again. I’ve watched the entire series of Futurama and Arrested Development at least three times each, and for the past few years I’ve had what’s become sort of a ritual of watching every streamable season of American Dad! every summer. Other than that, I basically just try to keep tabs on when new seasons of old favourites become available (Trailer Park Boys, Criminal Minds, Big Bang Theory, etc). I don’t follow most popular shows. I barely ever start watching a new show.

So you can probably guess that since I’m writing a blog post about it, I’ve started watching something new.

This one is called Episodes. The premise is that a couple of British TV writers move to LA to shoot a pilot for an American version of their hit show. It’s a pretty interesting premise, I think. Their plans hit a massive snag when the lead role of the show is given to Matt LeBlanc.

And now you see what really pulled me in.

Matt plays a (hopefully) fictional version of himself, and he ends up causing many headaches for the main characters, Sean and Beverly. The couple quickly lose creative control of the show to Matt and network meddling, and things spiral out of control fairly quickly.

It’s not terribly funny at the start. In fact, I’d go so far to say that the first episode is fairly dull. I think I laughed once? But it does get much better! That first episode sets up the premise really well and introduces a handful of key themes of the show. Which, I suppose is really the point. I found that I got attached to most of the characters fairly quickly, and by the end of season one I was enjoying the drama as much as I was the comedy.

I think that what I like about this show is that it’s another one where every character is fundamentally broken in some way. It’s a lot like Arrested Development in that way, only there are more sympathetic characters in Episodes. It’s a little more down-to-earth when there’s a mix of characters that you can honestly relate to and ones that ones that you just want to slap for being such assholes.

I also appreciate the look behind the curtain of how things work at a television network, even if it is exaggerated to some degree. The “office politics” angle sort of reminds me of Better Off Ted, but the humour is a little darker and more subtle.

Anyway, I burned through the first season in only two days (not an impressive feat; it’s only seven episodes), despite the first episode being slow and not overly funny. Like I said, it got better, and I’m now facing the difficult decision to go ahead and binge on the next two seasons right away, or leave them on the back burner for a while to enjoy later.

If you’re interested at all, the first three seasons are available on Netflix, and season four just finished airing in March. It wouldn’t get my highest recommendation, but Episodes is definitely worth checking out.

Mike Tyson and some mysteries

My TV and movie viewing tastes are pretty much the same as they used to be. If anything, they’ve expanded. The problem is that I rarely feel like I have it in me to sit down and watch a movie, never mind start watching a TV series. And so my Netflix queue just grows and grows.

In fact, the majority of my TV consumption lately has just been watching BoJack Horseman again and again for some reason. Because I want to watch something light and fluffy, and animated shows tend to appeal to me more than live action. And there aren’t many animated sitcoms on Netflix other than Futurama, American Dad!, and Family Guy, all of which I’ve watched already, and have far too many episodes for me to be able to just choose one and throw it on.

The other night, though, I found the perfect thing. Mike Tyson Mysteries. I was hoping for (but not expecting) a little more, but it ended up being just another stupid Adult Swim thing with 11-minute episodes. Fortunately, I ended up enjoying it far more than I probably should have.

mtmystery

Mike Tyson is obviously the star, along with a merry band of mystery-solving sidekicks: his adopted Korean daughter Yung Hee, the ghost of the Marquess of Queensberry, and a talking pigeon named Pigeon.

I don’t want to call a honeydew a cantaloupe here; Mike Tyson Mysteries is a stupid show. Mike is a good-hearted moron, which is fine, but sometimes goes a bit too far. Like, even more unbelievably stupid than the average dumb sitcom guy. Pigeon is generally just annoying, and he gets more “jokes” than anyone else. Yung Hee just blends into the background most of the time, and hasn’t gotten enough lines yet to be anything other than the straight man to Mike’s fool.

I don’t have anything bad to say about Marquess. He’s voiced by Jim Rash, and that’s more than enough to make him infallible in my eyes.

There’s good stuff too, though! The stories are generally quite insane, and Mike’s stupidity entertains me just as often as it makes me facepalm. In one episode, for instance, he thinks that he’s unwittingly become a serial killer of astronauts, and has to go to the moon to discover a major government secret. Another one has him searching for proof of magic to restore an old wizard’s faith. A good portion of the jokes are quite funny, and I found myself very surprised at how often I was laughing out loud.

So it’s like a lot of other Adult Swim shows, where you’ve got to take the good with the bad. For example, in the first episode, there’s a running gag where Mike can’t pronounce the word ‘chupacabra.’ I was thinking that it was a missed opportunity that he always just sort of mangled it, and never pronounced it ‘chimichonga.’ But then, one of the funniest lines of the episode ended up being Pigeon’s earnest “‘Chupacabra’ is a really hard word for him.” I laughed and laughed. On the other hand, Marquess makes a really off-colour joke at one point in the fifth episode, and while the show goes to lengths to acknowledge that it’s a really bad joke (Marquess is distraught over it for the rest of the episode, Mike and Yung Hee ignore him for days afterward), it still sort of soured the entire episode for me.

There are only five episodes on Netflix as of this writing, as the show began airing in October and they didn’t just dump the entire run on there all at once. I’m likely going to be keeping up with this one, as like I said before, I enjoyed it far more than I should have. So go boot up Netflix and set it to Mike Tyson Mysteries next time you’ve got some time to kill. You might just like it too.