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Now here are accurate descriptions of some of the Warner Bros. cartoons you’ll never see on TV.
IN HAPPIER TV NEWS, the Viacom media conglomerate might be close to aggreiving an 11-year-old mistake. TV Guide reports one of the company’s cable channels, TNN, is planning to commission new episodes of The Ren & Stimpy Show, the cartoon classic originally made for, and mismanaged into the ground by, Viacom’s Nickelodeon channel. The atonement part is that TNN’s negotiating to rehire R&S creator John Kricfalusi, whom Nickelodeon ceremoniously fired as producer shortly into the original show’s second season.
Trio is a tertiary cable TV channel, originally formed as a US outlet for Canadian and British drama series. Late last year it became part of the USA Networks stable, which a few months later was acquired by Vivendi Universal. One of the new management’s first modes was to schedule Uncensored June, a month-long package of “Viewer Discretion Advised” movies and documentaries “Presented Unedited and Commercial-Free.”
The program block premiered Wednesday night. Uncensored turned out to be so heavily censored as to be a joke–or a pathetic publicity stunt.
The opening offering was Art and Outrage, a documentary recap of the ’80s-’90s “shock art” genre and the vehement politicians and preachers who unwittingly helped make it such a hit. Interspersed among the valiant speeches by freedom advocates denouncing American prudery toward the human body were still shots of the artworks in question. Any image areas containing genitalia, breasts, or sexual positions was obscured with digital blurring, superimposed big red dots, or both. The same thing happened an hour later with The Last Temptation of Christ. They’re gonna show Last Tango in Paris on Thursday–any guesses as to what’ll be left of that film when they’re through sanitizing it for our protection?
Other cable channels carried on basic or digital-basic tiers have had no problems showing nude scenes now and then (the Independent Film Channel, the History Channel, even A&E on occasion). One would like to imagine that Trio, under new French ownership, would be at least as uninhibited. But apparently non.
Somebody’s making new, electronically up-to-date versions of the classic streamlined TV set of the early ’60s, the fabulous Predicta!
First came the highly unofficial Star Wars Un-Premiere Party, Thursday at the Rendezvous (which is still open despite a little kitchen fire last Tuesday, thank you). Singer Cheryl Serio was the most elegant hostess, accompanied by our ol’ friends DJ Superjew and DJ EZ-Action.
Among the audiovisual attractions displayed on the video projector: Mark Hamill’s appearance on The Muppet Show (above), the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special (a truly bizarre spectacle indeed), and something billed as a Turkish language version of the original film but was really a whole different movie (a hilarious sword-and-scandal adventure) that happened to incorporate SW spaceship shots, with the SW producers’ apparent authorization.
ON SATURDAY, the 22nd anniversary of the Mt. St. Helens blowup was celebrated by Cheryl Diane (above) and three other singer-songwriter acts in Diane’s fourth annual Eruptive Revival cabaret. As you may recall, last year’s edition was cut short by that nasty fire at the Speakeasy Cafe (still a charred-out ruin today). No such mishaps marred this year’s show at the Cafe Venus/Mars Bar, thankfully.
SUNDAY AFTERNOON, the University District Street Fair was underway again, as tired and worn-out as I’ve always remembered it being. The products displayed at the “crafts” booths were barely distinguishable from those displayed in the smarmiest tourist “fine art” stores of LaConner. The food concessions were no different from the elephant ears and kettle korn sold summer-long from Puyallup to Ellensburg. The assorted musical acts tried to grab passersby’s attention, but (at least the acts I saw) failed to overcome the cloudy-afternoon ennui in full smothering force.
And, of course, the booths only temporarily hid the dozen or more empty storefronts along the half-mile strip known to all as The Ave. The city thinks it knows just what to do about the retail ennui–a construction project. To the City of Seattle bureaucracy, every problem is solvable by a construction project.
But it’s hard to imagine anyone other than a bureaucrat imagining that wider sidewalks and prettier street lights will draw non-student shoppers back from the malls; not while the daily papers continue to smear The Ave as A Problem Place with Those Problem People.
And as long as there’s no money to do the right things for the throwaway teens (often banished by middle-class parents over not fitting a proper upstanding image) but plenty of money to do things against them (police harassment schemes that only make things worse), this situation won’t change.
ON A HAPPIER NOTE, Sunday evening brought two of my all-time fave cartoonists, ex-local Charles Burns and still-local Jim Woodring, to a singing session at Confounded Books/Hypno Video.
You’ve gotta check out Woodring’s newest, Trosper. Painted in bright pastel colors you can eat with a spoon, and printed just like an old Little Golden Book, it’s a wordless, utterly engrossing little tale of a cute little elephant who just wants to have fun, in a world seemingly bent on frustrating him. It even comes with a CD by one of our fave neo-improv artistes, the incomprable Bill Frisell.
…(after Kevin Seal, natch) claims the recently assassinated Dutch politician you’ve read about wasn’t really as right-wing as international media accounts allege. (Other Dutch commentators and analysts, as you might expect, disagree with the ex-VJ’s assessment re: the politician; and insist the politician was almost as reactionary as the US newspapers would have you believe.)
THANX AND A HAT TIP to all who dared sit indoors on the first warm evening of the year to attend our glorious Clark Show at the Rendezvous. There will be another installment, bigger and better (see this space for exact date and time).
I’M PROUD TO SAY that I’ve seen at least one episode of almost every series on TV Guide’s new list of the 50 greatest TV shows of all time. The only one I’ve still never viewed: The old E.G. Marshall lawyer show The Defenders. I finally got to see a complete episode of Your Show of Shows at NYC’s Museum of TV & Radio, during last month’s Eastern jaunt.
…to the memory of Jack Roberts, who, almost singlehandedly, kept two American traditions alive locally into the ’90s: (1) The locally-owned, independent appliance store; and (2) the wacky-pitchman TV commercial.
ADVENTURES in celebrity name misspellings.
ANOTHER DIGITAL DIVIDE FALLS: More and more women are getting hooked on that onetime geeks-only craze, online gaming.
EXPLORE WILLFULLY-FORGOTTEN MEMORIES of Saturday mornings past at Bad Cartoons of the ’80s.
…to two of the greatest names in 20th century comedy–the original Bedazzled schmuck and the first funnyman of U.S. television.
…to 51-year TV veteran Mary Stuart, who has finally found the “Tomorrow” for which she had searched.
OUR ‘SIGNIFYING NOTHING’ PHOTO SHOW at the spendid Zeitgeist Kunst & Kaffee (2nd & Jackson in Seattle’s nicer-than-you-think Pioneer Square) ends this Wednesday. See it immediately.
However, this will not be your last chance to see our haunting color photos of abandoned signage. Another whole batch of these images will appear in the Spring issue of Arcade, the Northwest architecture-and-design journal. A release party for the issue will be held from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. this Thursday, March 7, at the picturesque Panama Hotel Tea House, 605 1/2 South Main Street in Seattle’s Chinatown/International District. Be there or be longitudinal.
WHY bad habits can actually be good for us.
A LOVING TRIBUTE, complete with audio clips galore, in honor of ’70s TV shows and commercials.
…the Seattle theatre-scene past of psychic-phone shill Miss Cleo (updated link).
…Terry Jones ponders what would happen if current ideologies i/r/t bombing any country where a terrorist lives were applied a little closer to home.
THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA are finally discovering something I knew all along: “It’s cool to be Canadian!”
It’s only natural this discovery should happen during an Olympic Games, in which media critics (and thousands of other viewers) in norther-tier U.S. regions routinely discover the more thoughtful, less hype-centric CBC coverage.
CBC’s even more vital during a Winter Olympics, what with the Dominion’s traditional strength in hockey, snowboarding, and especially curling (the official World’s Greatest Game). This vitality was only serendipitously enhanced by the emergence of two Canadians as heroes of the current games’ biggest story.
It must be noted, however, that NBC’s coverage this time around is thankfully more CBC-like. That is, it’s more devoted (especially in its daytime blocks on MSNBC and CNBC) to actual sports coverage aimed at people who are, or could conceivably become, interested in the actual sports. Someone there finally noticed that with the network no longer airing baseball, pro football, or (after this season) pro basketball, it’d better start to do right by the one big sports package it still controls.
Over the past three biennia, NBC’s Olympics telethons drew fewer and fewer viewers, especially young-adult TV viewers, even though they’re a celebration of young-adult achievement. By dumbing-down the events and their storylines into ready-for-prime-time pablum, tape-delaying events and then showing only brief snippets of them in between interminable personality-profile segments (usually about workaholic athletes who don’t really have personalities), and by reinterpreting every event as The US vs. Those People, NBC made its telecasts a big joke to anyone who seriously participated in these sports and a squaresville turnoff to other young-adult viewers.
So this time, we get long(er) stretches of live (or, on KING, two-hour-old) events, with canned cutaway segments respectfully educating viewers on the events and their particular inherent dramatic qualities. The personality pieces are fewer, and include at least a modicum of non-US participants. (Of course, it helped the network that it had a real news story at the games to which it could give the OJ/Monica/Jon Benet tabloid treatment.)
I still prefer the CBC approach, though. For one thing, they’ve got much more curling. Also, they spent much less time reiterating every twist-N-turn in the skating-judging affair, even though it starred two Canadians. And its late-night shows are refreshing apres-ski entertainments built around the games’ outdoor concerts (several of which have starred Canadian performers). NBC has the same ol’ grating Leno, who just gets more Attitude-dependent and unlistenable as he approaches his tenth anniversary.
THANX TO THE NEARLY 100 souls who braved the blustery Feb. night to attend our suave Signifying Nothing exhibition opening last night. The rest of you can see it seven days a week until March 6 at the 2nd & S. Jackson.
BACK ON THE POP-CULT FRONT, that PBS workhorse Sesame Street got a major format overhaul this week. The kiddie-ed show now features far fewer one-minute-or-less blackout skits and films, instead favoring longer segments (up to 10 minutes) with narratives and familiar characters. Producers say this restructuring is the result of intense audience research into what Those Kids Today prefer to see.
This, of course, begs the question: What will come in future years, as this long-attention-span generation enters adolescence? I’m no corporate futurologist a la Faith Popcorn, but there are certainly intriguing possibilities to imagine emergine sometime in the mid-2010s:
