First Look: Brooklyn Nine-Nine

One of the new TV shows I was looking forward to checking out this Fall aired this week, Brooklyn Nine-Nine.  This is one of those cases where advertising actually worked on me.  Thanks to watching TV online, I only ever really see like 5 ads.  Over and over and over again.  One of those ads (thanks to watching MasterChef) was for this show.  The fact that I was still laughing at most of the jokes in the ad after having watched it for so long definitely piqued my interest.

So, I am pleased to report that at least with the first episode, it looks like there is a lot more humor in the show than even the ads showed.  While the main character conflict (goof-off detective meets new by the book captain) is entertaining, I think my favorite character is probably Detective Rose Diaz, a super tough and scary lady who looks like she's suffering from a particular disorder.  The super awkward nervous cop who wants to go out with her is kind of an obvious source of humor, but it's done very well.  It's also nice that there doesn't seem to be any actual drama in the show (so far), just pure comedy.  I'm definitely looking forward to seeing more of this show and hoping that it wasn't just a really good pilot.

Coming Attractions: Fall 2013 Television

New shows are in bold.  Each show is followed by when it starts and what channel, roughly what I know about it, and my expectations for it

• Sundays
• The Amazing Race
• Starts September 29th on CBS
• One of my two favorite reality competitions where teams race around the world trying to complete various challenges and reach their destination before the other teams
• Hopefully there won't be super annoying drama teams this year or if there are they get knocked out early (kind of a general hope for all reality competition shows)
• Once Upon A Time
• Starts September 29th on ABC
• Every fairy tale you've ever heard is true, just in another dimension and this is a story about those dimensions and characters colliding with our own
• I'm hoping there are more character reveals where the audience gets to try to figure them out during the episode
• Mondays
• Sleepy Hollow
• Starts September 16th on FOX
• Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman are in modern times
• I'm not entirely sure what to expect, but this will get the normal three episode judgement of a new show, looks like it could be entertaining
• How I Met Your Mother
• Starts September 23rd on CBS
• Final season where Ted will finally meet the mother
• There better not be any nonsense about Robin and Ted getting back together, that should've stopped after season 2 and yet it keeps reoccuring
• Tuesdays
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine
• Starts September 17th on FOX
• Not sure the premise is, looks like a funny show about cops
• The trailers for this were pretty funny, hopefully the trailers didn't show all the jokes
• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
• Starts September 24th on ABC
• Joss Whedon.  Marvel.  Superheroes.
• Joss Whedon.  Marvel.  Superheroes.
• New Girl 
• Starts September 17th on FOX
• Zooey Deschanel being awkward and funny and a bunch of guys being funny
• Honestly, I was starting to lose interest in this show near the end of last season, so I hope it gets me hooked again somehow
• Wednesdays
• The Tomorrow People
• Starts October 9th on CW
• Superheroes.
• Superheroes.
• Survivor
• Starts September 18th on CBS
• My other favorite reality competition because the people design the actual game aspects (both the overall game and the challenges) are really good and I love to see what they add/change next
• Again, hoping there isn't a super drama contestant or if there is, they should at least be entertaining drama like Coach "The Dragon Slayer" Wade
• Arrow
• Starts October 9th on CW
• Modern day, mostly realistic Green Lantern TV show
• I was amazed by how much I like this show last year and hope they just continue being awesome!
• Thursdays
• The Crazy Ones
• Starts September 26th on CBS
• Robin Williams and Sarah Michelle Gellar in a comedy about something or other
• Robin Williams and Sarah Michelle Gellar are enough to sell me on just about anything
• Once Upon A Time in Wonderland
• Starts October 10th on ABC
• Once Upon A Time spin-off focused on the Wonderland dimension and Alice in the modern world
• I'm honestly not expecting to like this one as much as the original for a number of reasons, but I'm hoping to be wrong
• The Big Bang Theory
• Starts September 26th on CBS
• Seven characters getting more and more caricatured as their roles as nerds doing random stuff that is usually funny
• I'm constantly going back and forth about how I feel about this show.  Some weeks it's hilarious.  Other weeks they take something geeky and portray it as inaccurately as possible in order to get cheap laughs and I get mad.  Other weeks Leonard is just completely incompetent at even the most basic common sense thing when it comes to interacting with Penny and it makes no sense.

TV Shows I Grew Up On: Freakazoid

Super teen extraordinaire, Freakazoid, Freakazoid.  Runs around in underwear, Freakazoid, Freakazoid.  This was by far the most bizarre, but most hilarious superhero cartoon I watched while growing up.  Dexter Douglas was a mild-mannered (and stereotypical) computer nerd who had the (mis)fortune of buying a new model of computer that when a specific set of keys was pressed followed by Delete would send the user hurtling into cyberspace and give them the powers of the Internet.  His cat enters walks across the keyboard pressing all the right keys in order and naturally, Dexter tries to delete it and becomes the Freakazoid whenever he yells the words, "Aw, Freak Out!"  The Freakazoid is insane, slightly childish, and seems to have the powers of Looney Tunes cartoons (i.e. he can do whatever he feels like when the plot calls for it).

His villains include the likes of Arms Akimbo - a mafia thug whose arms got stuck akimbo, so he can't pick stuff up and he tends to flap his elbows a lot, Candle Jack - a kind of ghost-like villain who will kidnap anyone who says his name (which of course Freakazoid does even after knowing that because comedy demands it), The Lobe - a guy with a giant brain for a head, who at one point tried to turn everyone in the worlds to clowns, and many more equally ridiculous villains.  Sometimes they'll have short mini-adventures for other heroes like Lord Bravery (whose exploits involve fighting a bakery for the trademark to his name), The Huntsman (essentially a Charlton Heston Robin Hood), etc.  They also have hilarious songs every once in awhile like Bonjour Lobey (parody of Hello, Dolly!), educational bits like learning to say who cut the cheese in French, and Relax-o-Vision (basically just clips of fish swimming in an aquarium while relaxing music plays).  Freakazoid is a very silly and childish show that I still very much love.  It's basically the 90's version of Looney Tunes (even more so than Tiny Toons) and paired well with Animaniacs, which aired around the same time.

TV Shows I Grew Up On: Cartoon Planet

I was looking at some of my music to see if I could find some music I could write about for Blank I Grew Up On and I came across my three CDs based off of Cartoon Planet and decided to write about that instead solely because of the...man? pictured, Brak.  Cartoon Planet was a one hour block of old Hanna Barbera cartoons with hilarious and random clips between featuring Space Ghost, Zorak, and Brak.  For the younger folks, Space Ghost was a superhero from the 60's, Zorak and Brak were some of his villains.  Only, on Cartoon Planet, Zorak and Brak are prisoners of Space Ghosts and forced to help him host this show.  Oh, and Brak is a hilarious idiot.

The CDs were made up of audio versions of a lot of the songs and skits they would perform between cartoons.  These included songs like Brak wondering what day it is or how much he loves beans.  It's really hard to explain how awesome these songs and skits were (for the most part) because they all sound so stupid, but I think that's mostly what makes them so good.  It seems like the three voices behind the characters were just making stuff up and having fun with being ridiculous.  It's kind of like a comedy movie with a bunch of actors good at improv just having a good time.  Or, like the mind of Neil Flynn.

TV Shows I Grew Up On: The A-Team

One of my other favorite TV shows growing up was The A-Team.  The premise was fairly simple: a crack special forces team was framed for a crime they didn't commit and are wanted by the military police.  While they try to clear their name, they live as soldiers of fortune for anyone with a worthy cause (and usually some sort of payment).  Most episodes are them trying to help the little guy who is being overwhelmed by greedy corporations, landowners, rival companies, etc. and won't or can't stoop to the levels of the bad guys.  Because this show was made in the 80's, it's pretty darn black and white: there are clear good guys and clear bad guys with not many plot twists.  But honestly, that's part of what I love about it so much.  That and the fact that no matter how horrendous a car/helicopter/plane crash is, everyone gets out of it just slightly bruised and sore, even the bad guys.  Also, no one ever gets shot by all the ridiculous amount of gunfire that goes on unless it's an important part of the plot.

What made the show so wonderful was the four main characters: John "Hannibal" Smith (the brain who concocts all their wild schemes and love it when plans come together); Templeton "Faceman" Peck (the pretty boy con artist who could talk anyone out of everything the had and almost always got the girl in the end); Bosco "Bad Attitude" Baracus (the muscle and wheel man on the crew, who had a heart of gold if you weren't Murdock); H.M. "Howling Mad" Murdock (the pilot who is declared insane, but always makes you wonder if he truly is).  Most episodes focused on the four of them together, but occasionally there'd be an episode that focused specifically on one of them for character development.  Almost every episode also went the same way - starts off showing someone in trouble, who then goes on a long and seemingly ridiculous quest (or so we're told) to find the A-Team, the A-Team reveals themselves to the bad guys in a show of force, the bad guys push back harder, the A-Team starts welding/building/constructing as part of "the plan", the A-Team is successful after a large fight with at least one vehicle flipped over, everyone lives happily ever after (except the bad guys).

This ridiculous, over the top, and completely unrealistic action is precisely why I was afraid of a modern day movie version of The A-Team (since so many directors/writers nowadays need everything to be dark, gritty, and super realistic), but as it turns out, the people who made that movie got it and it was a wonderful homage to this glorious TV show.  If you have never seen this show, I would highly recommend it, but just like with MacGyver, don't expect to take anything even remotely seriously and don't expect any amazing plot twists or you'll be disappointed.

Review: Whodunnit?

The summer is a strange period where there are more people with free time, but significantly lacking quality new media.  Movies seem to know how to take advantage of this, but for some reason, there's an incredible lull in new games and new television and generally what is released is pretty terrible (with a few notable exceptions).  The summer seems to be a good time for TV producers to test out their unique reality TV show ideas like The Mole, Pirate Master, and this season's show, Whodunnit.

The premise of the show is one of those murder mystery parties/dinner theaters with a reality competition laid on top of it.  Each episode, there is a murder.  The contestants must try to piece together the murder.  Each one can choose to investigate the crime scene, the morgue, or the last known location the person was before the murder.  Since no contestant can be in all three places, some information must be shared, but the murderer is among them, so it's hard to tell who to trust.  Not to mention that they are all competing to be the final contestant "left alive".  After the investigation, everyone is given a riddle (a la Treasure Hunters), whose solution will lead to one more clue to how the murder occurred.  Then in a confessional, the contestants lay out their theory of how the crime took place and who the murderer is.  The two contestants whose theories were furthest from what happened become marked, with one of them becoming the murder victim for the next episode.

It's a really interesting premise for a show, but it definitely is pretty darn awkward.  The deaths are so blatantly fake that the contestants even remotely acting like any of it is real is really just insulting to their (and our) intelligence.  One contestant convulses on some wet ground as a cut, sparking wire lays on the ground kind of near her, but clearly not touching the water; one contestant on fire runs outside and jumps in a pool and somehow instantly drowns?; one contestant "conveniently" needs to go to the kitchen because their meal wasn't cooked like everyone else's and gets "attacked" by a mountain lion?  I'm pretty sure everyone knows how murder mysteries are supposed to be, so acting like it's real when there's no real effort made to make it appear real is just strange.  The confessionals where the contestants lay out their theory about the murder are just terribly acted (I'm sure the people had fun doing them, but over the top doesn't begin to describe it).

The other annoying part is that it's a lot like the Sherlock Holmes books, in that, as the viewer, there is no way for us to really play along or figure out anything ahead of time.  The riddles are more like scavenger hunts and all the contestants seem pretty stupid, so it honestly could be any of them, but despite that, there is some part of me that wants to keep watching.  Maybe part of me is hoping it'll turn out like the murder mystery episode of Saved by the Bell where there will be a twist of epic proportions part way through, but most likely this will just be a show that was much better in concept than in production.  Really, it's just making me more upset that Treasure Hunters never got another season...

TV Shows I Grew Up On: MacGyver

One of my all-time favorite TV shows is MacGyver. For those of you who haven't seen the show (who should remedy that as soon as possible - let me know and I'll lend you the DVDs), the show is about this mulleted guy, MacGyver, who solves problems in creative ways.  For example, during a car chase, he realizes the brake line has been cut, so the person he's with takes the wheel, he gets on the hood of the car and uses a pen's spring and tube to fix the problem.  His fixes always have two things in common, they use whatever stuff he happens to find around him or bring with him (he's a live action point-and-click adventure game character!) and the solution is always very short term (usually just to escape the people chasing him or get out of the room he's been locked in).

In the first few seasons, MacGyver is a "problem solver" for the government.  Really, that's the job title he tells everyone.  So most episodes involve him going to different countries to try to stop some big conspiracy, save some third world country from itself, or do other Mission Impossible style hijinks.  Occasionally, his buddy, Jack, will get him into trouble with some new get rich quick scheme.  Sometimes, a world class assassin, Murdoc, will be either assigned to kill him or trying to get revenge for the last time he failed (these are always the best episodes!).  Eventually, MacGyver gets hired by the Phoenix Foundation, which is much more about saving the world through the environment, so he starts taking on the big, evil corporations.  By the end of the series, he's a huge environmentalist, health nut, hippie type character, which is especially funny because in the pilot he smokes some cigarettes to get past some lasers (of course) and there's no way the character at the end of the show would do that, so it's funny to see how much the character changed without any mention of these changes.  He's always represented as he always was how he currently appears.  So according to the end of the series MacGyver, he was always a health nut environmentalist.

Another funny change the show took is that the pilot clearly wanted to represent his clever solutions to things as more realistic and even very scientific.  He plugged up a leaking vat of sulfuric acid with a chocolate bar he had with him and while he was doing this, he was explaining the science behind why chocolate could be used this way.  As the show went on, the solutions and escapades became more and more ridiculous, from being transported back in time to King Arthur's days and basically having a Yankee in King Arthur's Court episode or to using a giant punch board computer from Atlantis (which was really just a giant tumbler lock and not a computer at all).  But it's still a great show, as long as you never ever take one minute of it seriously.

TV Shows I Grew Up On: Finders Keepers

After a break pause, I'm back to my Nickelodeon theme for these Blank I Grew Up On posts.  This time, I'll be talking about the game show, Finders Keepers.  I didn't watch much of this show, so I'm going to have to rely heavily on that wiki page to remember how it works, but it essentially boils down to two teams of two kids would race to find hidden objects in a picture and then find items hidden inside rooms in a house that are just as messy and ridiculous as any hidden object game.  I'm guessing what drew me to this show were those old Highlights magazines found in doctor and dentist offices that always had a couple hidden object activities in them.

As stated, the first part of the game had the teams searching for hidden items on a giant picture.  Doing so would give the team some money and a chance to search a specific room of the house (sometimes normal house rooms like the living room or kitchen, other times ridiculous themed rooms like Frankenstein's Laboratory) for a specific object.  The rooms were filled with all sorts of junk and had traps that would go off to try to distract the kids (confetti cannons, falling shelves, etc.).  If the team found the correct item and showed it to the host before their time was up, they'd earn more money.  Sometimes the object would garner and instant prize awarded with the money.

After repeating this whole process with two giant pictures and the associated attempts at finding items in the house, the team with the most money would go on to search the house for more prizes.  The teams would be shown six rooms they were going to search and given one clue to the first item.  Each item found would give them a prize and a clue to the next item.  The prizes got better as more items were found.  Apparently, the creators of this show managed to film 260 episodes total and the show ran for two years, which means 5 new episodes must have been on every week.  Now I'm curious how I didn't watch more of this show...

TV Shows I Grew Up On: Are You Afraid of the Dark?

Continuing with the Nickelodeon theme, another great show I watched as a kid was Are You Afraid of the Dark?  I'm not asking a question...that's its name...The general premise of the show is that a bunch of kids, members of The Midnight Society, sit around a campfire telling each other scary/bizarre/supernatural stories.  Each episode was one of those stories played out for the viewer.  Occasionally the story would be interrupted by the other Midnight Society members, which reminded you this was being told around a campfire.  It always started and ended at the campfire and (as in most kid show fashion) the story would generally be relevant to what one of the kids was doing at the beginning of the story (if one of the kids was being a jerk, the story would be about someone being a jerk getting punished in a scary way, etc.).

I loved this show because of how varied the stories were and how not every story was scary.  Some were just paranormal without any kids being in danger.  Then there were the ones with the clowns...this probably is part of the cause for my aversion to clowns.  This and Tim Curry.  It probably also helps that one of the very first episodes I saw had lizard people and a giant sewer dragon/lizard thing.  The Goosebumps TV show came out near the end of this show, but it wasn't comparable at all other than they were both scary story shows.  This show was far superior in every way.

Things I'm Looking Forward To This Summer

• Movies
• Much Ado About Nothing - June 7th
• Joss Whedon does Shakespeare, need I say more?
• Monsters University - June 21st
• Prequel to Monsters Inc.
• Despicable Me 2 - July 3rd
• Sequel to the amazing movie Despicable Me
• Pacific Rim - July 12th
• Essentially King of the Monsters the movie
• The Wolverine - July 26th
• Another Wolverine focused movie, this time set in Japan
• Percy Jackson: Sea Of Monsters - August 16th
• Another movie based on the Percy Jackson books that I really want to read at some point because I liked the previous movie a lot
• Riddick - September 6th
• Another Riddick movie
• Television
• MasterChef - Started May 22nd
• Cooking competition between more average people than Top Chef
• Arrested Development - New Season released May 26th
• If you have not seen this series before, do it.  You must watch from the beginning for full effect.
• Video Games
• Fuse - May 28th
• Co-op sci-fi adventure with a couple buddies of mine
• Remember Me - June 4th
• Cyberpunk adventure about rewriting people's memories
• The Last Of Us - June 14th
• Survival horror after a fungal infection has taken over most of humanity
• Pikmin 3 - August 4th
• Control an army of little vegetable creatures to gather amazing "treasures" on a distant planet
• Mario and Luigi Dream Team - August 11th
• Another amazing RPG adventure for Mario and Luigi
• New Super Luigi U - August 25th
• Redoing of New Super Mario Bros. U focused on Luigi
• The Wonderful 101 - September 15th
• Control an army of superheroes to save the city (essentially another Pikmin!)
• Batman: Arkham Origins - October 25th
• A prequel to the two other amazing Batman Arkham games
• Other
• Pacificon Game Expo - August 30th-September 2nd
• Playing games all weekend and demoing Suspicion to complete strangers
• Suspicion Demo at Game Habitat - Tentatively June 1st
• Suspicion Demo at Illusive Comics and Games - Tentatively June 15th

The Downfall of Sitcoms

I've watched quite a few sitcoms in my day and I think I've started to narrow down one of the biggest differences between a good one and a bad one: the avoidability of the ridiculous situations that arise.  Sitcoms are all about taking real life situations to utterly ridiculous extremes.  In fact, I think it can probably be charted much like the Hot Crazy Scale.  The simpler it would be to diffuse a given situation, the less ridiculous the situation should get.  So for example, in this episode of Frasier, Frasier needs to get a book of his from Daphne's room and instead of waiting until she gets home and asking, he goes into her room to find it.  Now because it's a sitcom (and Frasier's an idiot), he doesn't just stop when he gets the book, but instead keeps looking through Daphne's stuff.  Daphne then comes in and (rightly so) gets super upset with him.  So if this is as far as it went, it would only be mildly stupid.  But, of course, it keeps escalating.  In his rush to get out of the room (instead of explaining what he was doing to Daphne), Frasier ends up taking a bottle of pills from Daphne's room.  Now, again, instead of apologizing to Daphne and explaining what an idiot he is, he decides to sneak in and put the bottle of pills back and ends up hiding around the room while Daphne comes in to undress and take a shower.  Later, both Frasier, his brother Niles (who is in love with Daphne), and their father are all sneaking around in her room to try to fix the situation only to spill wine everywhere and act like complete imbeciles with zero control over their own bodies.

A part of sitcom humor does seem to depend on the characters acting very stupid most of the time, but if they act so stupid so as not to be even remotely like a normal human being or stupid one episode and totally normal another, that makes it very hard to find the stupidity funny.  I think this sort of thing always happens at some point to any sitcom, so the question is how long a sitcom can last without depending on this large failure.  Or at the very least good writers can try to explain why the characters' brains stopped functioning momentarily.  The very worst case is that character becomes the dumb character and perpetually gets dumber and dumber.  I'm looking at you, Joey Tribbiani.

TV Shows I Grew Up On: Legends of the Hidden Temple

When I was writing last week's Blank I Grew Up On, it made me think of another wonderful game show found on Nickelodeon (I might end up having a Nickelodeon game show theme for the next couple weeks come to think of it...), Legends of the Hidden Temple.  Each episode would start with six pairs of kids competing to see which pair would get to find this week's treasure in the hidden temple.  Each episode had a theme filled with historical facts and questions about some different artifact.

The contest was split into three elimination challenges.  First, the six teams must cross a moat with whatever method they are told to use (swing across using ropes, use a raft, swim, etc.  The first four teams to completely cross first and hit the button on the other side continue to the next round: The Steps of Knowledge.  The remaining four teams answer trivia questions to step down from the steps of knowledge.  Each right answer moves the team down another step.  The first two teams to the bottom of the stairs move on to the final round of team elimination.  The last two teams compete in different physical challenges that fit that episode's theme to earn parts of pendants of life.  After three of these competitions, the team with more pendant parts get to run through the hidden temple and try to find the artifact and bring it back out for the grand prize.

The temple itself is a large maze of various rooms that each have some trick or method to access adjacent rooms.  Contestants are told which room the artifact is in and must find their way into that room and get back out of the temple within a time limit to win.  However, there are three temple guards hidden within the temple that are out to catch them.  Generally, the guards were hidden along the prescribed path to get to the artifact in places the contestants were likely to trigger.  That is, if a player had to find a button in a sarcophagus to open the door and the room had multiple sarcophagi, then a guard would probably be in one of the others.  If the contestants had a full pendant of life, they could give it to the guard to keep going through the temple.  At most, a team could have 1.5 pendants of life from the last round of team elimination and another half was in the temple somewhere along the path they were meant to follow.  However, most teams only ever had one and so would be eliminated when the third guard was found (the first guard took the pendant, the second guard captured kid 1 of the team, and the third guard captured kid 2).

I always wondered if the kids had to travel along a certain path (the one the audience was shown/told about before the team entered the temple) or if they were free to try going other ways.  If they could only ever go along a certain path that it seemed designed to never let a team win ever.  I guess some teams did win, but I never witnessed these episodes.  This sort of goes along the lines of Nick Arcade where I understand that not every team can win, but at the same time it seemed unnecessarily harsh.  Of course, other times the kids were just idiots.

TV Shows I Grew Up On: Nick Arcade

It's probably no surprise that being such a gaming aficionado, that I grew up watching a variety of game shows.  One of those shows was Nick Arcade.  This show had three parts: a video game related trivia game, arcade challenges, and a  "real life" video game kids would run through.

The trivia aspect was nothing new or phenomenal.  If you've seen one trivia game, you've seen them all.  The arcade challenges tasked players to play through a stage or section of a stage in recent Super Nintendo/Genesis games trying to score a certain number of points.  Since every game had a different point system (or no point system), the goal required would be adjusted to fit the game - although I always felt some goals were ridiculously hard to obtain and others were super easy, so it seemed kind of arbitrary.  The team who got the most points in the first two parts of the game would try to defeat the boss of that episode by entering a VR simulator.  Note: I have no idea how this actually worked, so this is only speculation.  I believe the simulator was some sort of green screen that would show the kids running through a video game trying to collect three items around the level and then hit the boss, but all sorts of obstacles and traps were scattered around the level.

Based on how the kids performed, I always suspected it wasn't clear to them where the traps were or how it would hit them.  Either that or they just picked really dumb kids.  I understand that like arcades, game shows are designed to only let a few people win - they'd lose a bunch of money if they gave away the grand prize every episode.  However, it was always frustrating watching it at home and seeing the kids just stand on top of a spike trap and not realize they're getting hit until they get killed.  Since it was also a team, it  was especially disappointing to see when one team member knew what they were doing, but lost because their teammate didn't know what they were doing.  It was still a very entertaining show for the most part and apparently it was quite the technical marvel in its day.

Cartoons I Grew Up On: Darkwing Duck

I was blessed to grow up during the years of The Disney Afternoon, a 2 hour block of cartoons that ran immediately after school.  Every once a year or so, the four cartoons shown during this time would shift, so overall The Disney Afternoon was home to 13 or so different shows.  One of my all time favorites of those was the show, Darkwing Duck.

Darkwing Duck was a Disnified parody of superheros a la The Shadow.  By night, the titular character tries to stop crime by using a gas gun, scaring criminals with flashy appearances, and slapstick-fu.  The show is filled with parody, slapstick, puns, and goofy comedy.  It also crosses over with the Ducktales universe multiple times - DW's sidekick is Launchpad McQuack, his rival superhero is Gizmoduck, and cameo appearances by the Beagle Boys, Flintheart Glomgold, and Magicka De Spell.

I think what makes me love Darkwing Duck so much is the lineup of villains, just like Batman.  They are all varied with their own shtick, origin stories, and motives, but every once in awhile they all team up to take down DW.  And just like Batman with the Justice League, Darkwing has the Justice Ducks, only they are much more inept than their DC counterparts.  This show is definitely filled with the kind of goody, wacky, and stupid humor that I love.  Probably because I grew up with shows like this...

TV Shows I Grew Up On: The Cosby Show

One of the absolute best television shows I grew up on was The Cosby Show.  For those who haven't ever seen the show, it revolves around the Huxtable family dealing with the situations common to family sitcoms.  What makes the show so awesome is how creative the parents, Heathcliff and Clair, are when dealing with the situations.  For example, when Theo as a teenager says he's going to move out because it'll be easier to live on his own than with his parents, Heathcliff and Clair setup the entire house to simulate the real world - they take out all his stuff from his room and make him pay rent to stay in it and buy back his own furniture and go through a job interview to earn that money in the first place.  There is also one episode where Heathcliff eats right before going to bed and the entire episode is Heathcliff's dream that involved Muppets and a lot of nonsense.  Another dream episode (caused by the same thing), puts Heathcliff in a world where men start becoming pregnant including all the men of the Heathcliff family.  Unfortunately, I can't explain the best part without spoiling the ending, but suffice it to say it is utterly ridiculous.

Other awesome things in this show involve Heathcliff's grandfather, played by the actor who voices Panthro in the Thundercats, an episode where all the set pieces look like real life versions of a five year old's drawings, Heathcliff loves jazz and plays the trombone, and the fact that Heathcliff always reminded me of my dad.  I'm pretty sure my dad knew that all us kids thought he was like Heathcliff and so I'm convinced that part of the reason my dad hates The Simpsons is because it came on at the same time as The Cosby Show and we started watching The Simpsons instead of The Cosby Show.  Looking back at this show and the first few seasons of The Simpsons, though, I don't really blame him.  This was a far superior show (at least until a couple seasons in to The Simpsons when the writing got a lot better).

Review: Better Off Ted

Better Off Ted is a sadly cancelled show that I didn't find out about until well too late that has now become one of my favorite TV show series.  The show takes place in a fictional company called Veridian Dynamics that builds...well...whatever the company feels like it needs, like exploding pumpkins, test tube grown beef, or bulletproof plates.  The show focuses on the head of the research department, Ted, his boss, Veronica, his co-worker/love interest, Linda, his daughter, Rose, and two of the greatest scientists ever, Phil and Lem.

Generally, each show involves some ridiculous research product, some life lesson for Ted, a hilarious commercial by Veridian Dynamics (even better than those commercials in RoboCop), and some wacky science gone wrong by Phil and Lem (who are totally not mad scientists...).  It's got big, evil, faceless corporation humor, odd couple humor, awkward romantic situation humor, and just sheer random humor all tossed in together.  If you have Netflix, I would highly recommend you watch this show, it's only 26 episodes.  I'll just leave you with a commercial for Veridian Dynamics:

TV Show Idea: Matrix Murders

Synopsis: In order to convince people that they are inside The Matrix, a group of humans that have escaped (red pills) enter in and solve otherwise unsolvable crimes.  The operators outside the Matrix are able to hack the system in various ways (disguising the people inside the Matrix, changing the environment, giving the people jacked in tools and weaponry, etc.).  The more frequently the operators hack or the jacked in people bend the rules of the Matrix, the faster the Agents will find the group and eliminate them.

Basic episode plot: Someone's loved one just died/someone is being stalked by a murderer/etc.  The heroes approach that person and convince them they can solve the mystery.  As the operators read clues from the code and the jacked in people bend the rules to access areas normal people couldn't, the Agents start to chase the heroes.  Eventually the mystery is solved, the heroes escape the Matrix, the person saved/involved is rescued from The Matrix and brought to Zion.

Season 1 overarching story: One particular Agent is obsessed with catching the group and progressively bends/breaks more and more of the Matrix rules in order to catch the group with a climactic battle ending with the Agent being disowned by the other Agents.

Season 2 overarching story: A group of humans who don't agree with Zion or its goals have split off and formed their own city.  They are trying to work with the Agents to bring all of humanity back into the Matrix because it is more peaceful than their current existence.  This group is constantly working against the heroes all while the Agent from Season 1 is trying to find where he belongs.  Throughout the season his alignment shifts between working against the heroes and working to help the heroes.

Cartoons I Grew Up On: Thundercats

With the planet of Thundera about to die, some of the nobility, the Thundercats, escape to safety in a space ship.  They enter sleeping pods on the ship in order to go into suspended animation until a suitable new home is found.  Unfortunately for the young Lord of the Thundercats, Lion-O, his pod malfunctions and he ages during his sleep.  When they awake, they find themselves on a planet called Third Earth, where they try to get along with and aid the friendly inhabitants of the planet, while at the same time constantly defending attacks from the evil ones, such as Mumm-Ra the Ever Living.

I once tried to introduce a friend to this series, making the mistake of having not watched it myself since I was a kid.  I had forgotten just how cheesy this show was and even though my nostalgia (and my love of cheesy cartoons) was able to help me ignore the cheesiness, my friend was not so lucky.  Just like many shows of the 80's, this series is fairly predictable as a whole.  The good guys will always win by the end of the show (unless it's a two-parter) and their method of success is almost always the same.  Just when things look their worst, Lion-O will use the power of the Eye of Thundera in the hilt of his Sword of Omens to break whatever enchantment is on the ThunderCats, give them strength to overcome their enemies, or overwhelm their enemies with fear.

Part of the cheese factor was that every episode would end with a life lesson teaching good morals and values.  This is precisely why I think showing this show to your kids is a great idea.  And as I am overly excited to tell everyone I can, Panthro is voiced by the grandfather from the Cosby Show, which is also very awesome.

Cartoons I Grew Up On: Pirates of Dark Water

Mixing alien worlds with piratical themes, The Pirates of Dark Water is all about one man's quest to recover the thirteen treasures of Rule to save his planet from a mysterious dark substance in the water that eats whatever it touches.  He is joined by a gruff pirate (who turns out to have a heart of gold), a feisty female, and a monkey-bird.  However, the evil pirate Bloth wants the treasures for himself, so he and his crew are constantly chasing Ren (the main character).

This show was awesome because not only was it action packed, but since it took place on an alien world (Mer), they didn't have to follow our reality at all.  So the fact that Ren's ship could essentially transform into a glider or that parts of the planet were constantly in flux were just normal to all these adventurers, but to a little kid it was fuel for the imagination.  Also, like Avatar the Last Airbender and Greek mythology, this show liked to combine animals we know together in strange ways (like Niddler the monkey-bird).  Also also, there are pirates, which have always been cool (except if you lived in a time with real ones most likely).

Ever since college I've been waiting for these to show up on DVD, but apparently I stopped my hunt two years ago because I just discovered today that there is a DVD set of the whole show that you can get from Amazon that was released in 2010.  Unfortunately, the show itself never got to conclude, so you'll have to use your imagination to come up with how the final treasures were recovered and what happened when all of them were brought together.  If someone wanted to do a reboot/reimagining/retelling of this series and finish it, I would be totally okay with that.  Unless his name was M'Knight or Michael Bay.

TGIF

This past week, my Bible Study group had a potluck in lieu of our regular meeting.  While chatting, we had Big Bang Theory playing on the TV and at some point the topic of sitcom variety was brought up and we started reminiscing about ABC's old Friday night line up called TGIF.  Throughout the years, the 4 shows shown during TGIF changed, but they all had a common theme: they were all very family friendly.  The better shows had some humor for adults, occasionally they'd broach a harsh subject, but for the most part, they were just feel good shows trying to teach good lessons.

Looking at sitcoms today, I can't think of a single show that fits that same category.  Every single sitcom I can think of has at least one character whose sole focus is to have as much sex as possible.  (By no means are those examples a definitive list, but it's pretty clear there's an easy trope to use in a sitcom.)  Most of these shows are also about adults in their 20's or 30's dealing with life rather than about a family dealing with life together (or just dealing with each other).  I understand that kids who grew up on those shows (like myself) are now adults and are looking for something more grown up.  At the same time, there are plenty of parents that (I'm sure) would love to have a show they could watch with their kids that is good and wholesome and teaches good values.  I find it strange that there is such a gap in our programming.  Does the modern day TGIF group of shows exist and I just am unaware of it?  Where is our Cosby Show (not part of TGIF, but it totally could have been), Family Matters, Perfect Strangers, Boy Meets World (oh wait), and Step by Step?

I'm not saying every show should be family friendly because that would be ridiculous in the opposite direction.  I'm saying that just like how not all superhero shows need to be dark and gritty, not all sitcoms need to be about bar/coffee shop/comic book shop dwelling 20-30 year old singles.  Of course, my friend Jason is probably going to tell me the same thing that the market doesn't want this type of show, but personally, I think there's more than enough room for both and if we're going to let the TV babysit our kids (as seems to happen frequently in the US), then why not give them a babysitter with good morals and values?