Apparently the human brain is a lot like cookie dough...

Thanks to this article at Cracked.com, I have just seen what might have become the most awesome half-hour sitcom in the history of television.

I had never heard of this show before, but it was a unaired pilot that never got any further than the first episode. It's like The Six Million Dollar Man meets The X-Files meets Knight Rider meets The Incredible Hulk. I'm talking about Heat Vision and Jack. Starring Jack Black as rogue astronaut Jack Austin and Owen Wilson as the voice of his sentient motorcycle, Heat Vision.

Very funny and inventive, lots of in-jokes referring to other TV shows and certain TV tropes. Fortunately, the episode lives on in cyberspace and you can view it on YouTube.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

TV Tropes

Here's a site that I got lost in for a little while this morning and only broke it off because I had to leave for work: TV Tropes.

Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations. On the whole, tropes are not clichés. The word clichéd means "stereotyped and trite". In other words, dull and uninteresting. We are not looking for dull and uninteresting entries. We are here to recognize tropes and play with them, not to make fun of them.

The wiki is called "TV Tropes" because that is where we started. Over the course of a few years, our scope has crept out to include other media. Tropes transcend television. They exist in life, as we will be quick to tell you. Since a lot of art, especially the popular arts, does its best to reflect life, tropes are likely to show up everywhere. Right, so what is a "wiki"? A wiki is a web site where any user can create new pages, edit existing pages, link between pages, and search the site. You can even edit this page, if you wish. This may seem strange, but it can be an extremely powerful and flexible way to take notes, collaborate and work on the web.

We are not Wikipedia. We're a buttload more informal. There Is No Such Thing As Notability, and no citations are needed. If your entry cannot gather any evidence by the Wiki Magic, it will just wither and die. Until then, though, it will be available through the Main Tropes Index. We encourage breezy language and original thought (and won't object to the occasional snarky comment, either).

Fun and informative. Thanks to Brer.

Everything talks on Living Island

I have been revisiting my childhood lately by watching this. Remember it? How I would love to go back in time and poke around their sets. What a totally surrealistic trip that would be.

When I was five years old, H.R. Pufnstuf was my favorite show. I watched it every Saturday morning with near religious fervor, if a 5-year-old can have near religious fervor. I still have a record of songs from the show that I got as a member of the fan club (my mother signed me up). Someday soon I'll have to drag it out and post some jacket scans as evidence.

I'm sure my dedication to the show as a small child had some lasting impact on me. I'm just not sure exactly what that impact was. But if you've ever read anything on this blog that made you think, man, what happened to that guy when he was a kid, this may have been what happened.

I think I'll have to hunt down Lidsville next.

Hot chicks eating live mice -- on TV!

ABC is working on a remake of V.  This time the main hero is a female Homeland Security agent.  Naturally.  Couldn't let the hero be a common prole.  It has to be a special Only One.

No word yet on whose side Freddy Krueger will take.

I am fiddling with my sausage

Last month I joined Netflix, and most of my current queue is not even movies. Most of it is old TV shows that I have lost hope of ever seeing again.

I am happy to report that the entire run of 'Allo, 'Allo (all nine seasons!) is available, as are all episodes of Ripping Yarns.

And: Red Green!!!

Unfortunately, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin is not available. Maybe someday.

One more thing about Brimstone

I forgot to mention in the previous post that the theme music is by Peter Gabriel.

Brimstone

NOTE: My memory was faulty when I typed this up late last night, so I have corrected a couple of things. For whatever that's worth.

*****

If you have a cable/satellite package that includes the Chiller channel, tomorrow they're running a Brimstone marathon beginning at 8:00 AM central time. Only 13 episodes were made, which ran on Fox in 1998 back when they were trying to keep capitalizing on the weird phenomena/creepy stories phase that was created and led by The X-Files. I thought Brimstone was much better. Peter Horton plays a cop named Ezekiel Stone who should have gone to Heaven when he died, but didn't. His wife was raped, the rapist was caught but escaped punishment due to a legal technicality, so Stone hunted him down and killed him. A few months later Stone was killed in the line of duty, and because of how he had technically murdered the rapist, he went to Hell. He spent 15 years there, and then something happened and 113 demons escaped from Hell to roam free on the earth. So the devil (John Glover, who does a great job) made a bargain with him: Stone could go back to earth where he would hunt down each demon and send it back to Hell. If he succeeded, he would be given a second chance at living again, and perhaps not go to Hell the next time he died.

Since Stone is technically undead, many of the rules of human weaknesses don't apply to him. He doesn't have superhuman strength or anything like that, and he is still human in many ways, but there is only one way to kill him so he can take a lot of punishment without dying (although he still feels pain). There are lots of tiny details in the story that made it great, for example, every morning when he awoke he had the same exact amount of money in his pockets that he had when he died. Since he had died in 1983, he missed out on 15 years of earth stuff so many bits of news and "current events" references puzzle him until he figures them out.

The tattoos that cover his body are there for a reason: each one is the occult symbol of one of the demons who escaped. Every time he "kills" one, the tattoo burns itself off his body, so he gets to writhe in agony for a few seconds every time he sends another demon back to Hell.

Lori Petty also appears in several episodes as someone who befriends him and who starts figuring out there's something strange about him. Unfortunately, the series didn't last long enough to develop their relationship any further.

This show was way too smart for Fox, so naturally it was canceled well before its time. But if you have time to catch an episode or two, I recommend it. I already have my DVD recorder set for it. They'll be running 8 of the 13 episodes.