5 Comments

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  Comment by corinne — November 9, 2016 @ 4:13 pm

  My brother and I watched season 2 of 24 in under 24 hours (I have never seen any other season of the show)

  Gonna miss you guys =(

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  Comment by Todd Mason — November 13, 2016 @ 6:44 pm

  Terribly sorry you’re wrapping it up here…but always sorry it seemed you’ve been getting far less feedback than you deserve on your own pages here. Thanks for doing a fine series for so long…just don’t go inspiring your professional partners to give up on their podcasts as well (go crash THE LONG SHOT, for that matter, as well as THE JV CLUB).

  Difficult for someone older than the home video era to recall the first binge opportunity I took advantage of, but I suspect it might’ve been someone’s TWILIGHT ZONE marathon in the 1970s, though I don’t remember when I first caught one of those…unless we count just how many times HOGAN’S HEROES played in syndication each day in the early/mid ’70s in stations one could watch in northeastern Connecticut. As a third grader, seeing three a day could get to be a Bit Much, even then (though the two stations staggered their feeds slightly).

  The moving mouths in the nearly static imagery series was CLUTCH CARGO, and it was definitely strange and goofy…but so was NEW ZOO REVIEW, which was meant to be an “educaitonal” weekdaily series, syndicated, as a “more wholesome” variation on the Sid & Marty Krofft body-suit series. Very awful for me even then, though I suspect if I check I might be a bit older than Huskey. For commercial television, so also ripping off MISTER ROGERS’ NEIGHBORHOOD (on NET, then PBS) and CAPTAIN KANGAROO (on CBS) to some extent as well, though less good than either And SESAME STREET, of course, which was perhaps a year older than NEW ZOO. Aside from YT, you can find the series still running on no-budget stations and networks, often Xian or shopping/infomercial ones, to “satisify” “educational” requirements.

  The Krofft series were the closest to actually damaging, I’d say, in their psychedelic excess…THE BANANA SPLITS emulated THE MICKEY MOUSE CLUB in having short form dramatic serial segments each episode, including a Very disturbing (to me at the time, at least) takeoff on Huckleberry Finn–while the rest of the episode was mostly devoted to suited creatures banging into each other while doing a dumbed-down version of the worst of THE MONKEES. Another of their series, LIDDSVILLE, features a kid who falls into a giant magician’s hat, and falls a sickening distance (I’ve been an acrophobe my whole life) into a suited world similar to H R PUFFNSTUFF’s, their second big hit after THE SPLITS. The only thing I’ve seen since that is as off-putting in that estranging way is the Icelandic import LAZYTOWN…where an acquaintance of mine was a puppeteer. The world gets smaller as one ages, sometimes.

  It was also somewhat cool that Mike Nesmith was cast as the brains of the Monkees, or at least the John Lennon, given that he was the one with the pronounced Texas accent, not commonly allowed to be associated with intelligence at all in 1960s tv.

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  Comment by Todd Mason — November 13, 2016 @ 6:51 pm

  Oh, and Huskey misremembers one aspect of the 1970s ZOOM–the kids on the show (and except for some filmed segments, only tweens were on camera) all wore matching rugby jerseys, rather than black turtlenecks. Very improv-groupish, if less so than Huskey remembers. I liked the series, even if the limited acting chops of the kids would tell, in their various sketches, interspersed with discussions they’d have, and filmed segments of other tweens doing pretty ridiculously impressive things, building things and going on arduous treks, all of which tended to remind me I was instead sitting watching a show on PBS. Though a slightly later teen show on PBS, REBOP, ground that in even harder, down to the theme: “Nobody can live or die for you/You’ve got to do it yourself…”–while demonstrating hyper-competent kids doing things I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to do at all. ZOOM was briefly revived by PBS around the turn of the 2000s, but didn’t do as well. I certainly had some of my first media crushes on the girls in the first series’ cast.

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  Comment by Todd Mason — November 13, 2016 @ 7:12 pm

  Sorry, Emily Peden played “Emmy Jo”…and the series apparently launched LOVE CONNECTION’s Chuck Woolery’s actiing career, such as it has been.

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  Comment by Todd Mason — November 14, 2016 @ 8:49 am

  That last comment makes less sense without the deleted comments before it…deleted for links to YouTube posts that Huskey mentioned?

  Would suggest in re the “three sorts of alien visitors” that all three are more representative of human tropes in attempting to understand psychic breaks, and perhaps to some extent people choosing to conflate their quasi-memory with someone else’s description. It is exceedingly unlikely that humans are the only creatures in this galaxy capable of space travel, but also exceedingly unlikely that any other travelers have found us, much less three distinct unrelated sets. Certainly all the probing accounts sound to me like attempts to come to grips with sexual abuse by other humans more than a likely behavior by far-travelling non-humans.

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