Delightfully cold and rainy!
This morning in the coffee shop I remarked to someone (affecting an insane John Aston grin); “The weather is delightfully cold and rainy! Channeling Gomez Addams, of course.”
The student behind the counter gave me a funny look, but a professor replied; “You’re dating your self!” (An expression that always sounded slightly obscene to me.) But it’s true. You have to be of a certain age to remember the original Addams Family; either the macabre New Yorker cartoons of American cartoonist Charles Addams or the 1960’s television show of the same name, starring John Aston as Gomez Addams and Carolyn Jones (grrrowrrr!) as his wife Morticia. Gomez was my kind of guy; full of life, madly in love with his wife, fabulously wealthy and possessed of a bizarre sense of humor. Or, maybe just possessed, it was difficult to tell.
At best, today’s youth have seen the 1991 movie remake, which was a good effort. And I can’t complain about Christopher Lloyd’s portrayal of Uncle Fester.
Anyway far be it from me to let the youth of today wander in cultural starvation, so I hunted around and discovered 5 episodes of The Addams Family absolutely free and in beautiful high-rez Black & White for your enjoyment. (Please ignore the laugh track; network executives required them in the ‘60’s and some still do today.)
What are your favorite offbeat shows?
Heh. “Is there a God?” They didn’t do too bad with those remakes, really. The little girl playing Wednesday was perfect.
Favorite offbeat shows: Blackadder, hands down. I’m not a sitcom person, but that’s damned good stuff. I still love running around yelling “Sausage? SAUSAGE?!” I can always tell a Blackadder fan by the people who burst into a knowing laugh.
Rocko’s Modern Life. Best cartoon ever. Contains a quote for every occasion. “Teevee! Teevee!”
Did John Aston ever play a non-likeable character in a movie or series?
Police Squad! catered to my (perpetually 14 y.o.) sense of humor. But Leslie Nielson was at his best stealing a pimped-out hydraulic car in “Wrongfully Accused” the movie …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOJHXDgIq9w
Very cool, thanks for the link! I can’t watch it north of the border due to copyright restrictions, but I’ll dig in this weekend and next week when I’m back in the Excited States.
Now if Rocky & Bullwinkle were online …
The Addams Family tv show is on http://www.hulu.com. So is Rocky and Bullwinkle.
I guess I’ll date myself as well. Which will be a nice change, usually I just get myself drunk and take advantage…uh, anyway…
Even though it was extremely cheesy, and the techno-babble was awfully silly even by 80’s standards, I loved Max Headroom. Still do, in fact. I just watched a couple of taped episodes the night before last.
That show was dated in some ways before it even aired, but I’m amazed by how well they captured the greedy, self-absorbed, short attention span essence of American culture. It is sad but also hilarious to me that it was canceled after only one season of going up against Dallas and Miami Vice, two of the most overrated yet wildly popular lumps of feces ever produced. I would rather watch the Max Headroom parody drama “Porky’s Landing.”
One of the episodes I watched the other night was about over-hyped reporting, sex scandals, and political corruption in their “tele-election” process, and I was wondering if the creators and writers ever watched modern news shows, or political pundit shows, or read political blogs and noticed how prescient they actually were. There must be a grim satisfaction that they share with Orwell and other dystopian visionaries when what was meant to be satire becomes reality. Replace the opening slogan “20 minutes into the future” with “20 years into the future” and they were pretty darn close. Our media have become bought-out political lapdogs whipping up empty populist rage primarily as a form of advertisement, the government is completely unaccountable to the people, the police and courts are more mercenaries and bodyguards for corporations and the rich than anything else, and corporations with extra rights and few rules own everything worth owning. All we need is a slightly bigger gap between the rich and the poor, and a few hundred thousand more homeless people (both of which should be coming along any time now) and we will be there…20 minutes into the future.
Ah, well…anyone feel like going out for a ZikZak BurgerPak?
Also, Sifl & Olly, from late 90’s MTV. If you’re not familiar, check youtube. It’s Crescent Fresh!
Ahh yes, Max Headroom! Loved that series. I think Sky Clearance is my favorite episode. Well hard to choose, actually. Have to think about it over a ZikZak burger.
Went looking for the series a while back, and could only find a pirate copy, which seemed appropriate for that particular series.
(Note to the producers / copyright holders: the moment you make a legitimate copy of the series available, I will buy it.)
Max—Ye-ye-ye-yes!
By the way Neil, spot-on about the “20 minutes/years into the future” analysis.
From what I’ve read here on your blog, I can see why you would like the Sky Clearance episode. If I recall correctly, that is the one about the Blanks having to pirate educational television to teach their kids to read, and having to hide their own unauthorized printing press. Little freedom of information, bureaucratic monopolies on education, and intellectual property laws being taken to the extreme-another comment on our current reality, as some movies and songs are getting close to their 100th year of copyright protection, only to benefit corporations and stockholders who had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of said material.
I watched one last night about “neurostim bracelets”, a direct-to-consumer form of advertising. There was a scene in the boardroom where one of the Network 23 board members was worrying about Max Headroom’s habit of criticizing and making fun of the company he was supposed to be endorsing. One of the others explained that he was the sponsor’s preferred spokesman, because he reached the large market of young, disaffected, untrusting consumers who hate the companies they have to patronize. Even as a teenager, I knew that Max had originally come to fame as a “celebrity” endorser, a product of commercials himself, and that while they were certainly satirizing bland commercial culture, they were also satirizing…ME. Gotta love it.