I've been wondering how to introduce Jerry Banfield.
Jerry Banfield makes videos about how to become a successful youtuber and his videos get very few views. He makes videos about relationship advice and he's divorced. He makes videos about dating advice and he's not particularly good with women. He makes videos about how to make money in cryptocurrency and has lost a lot of money in cryptocurrency. He's hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, actually, but believes he needs to keep spending money to turn it all around. He recently claimed to convert to Christianity - to get a girl - and immediately weaponized it against her. She broke it off. He also does gaming videos - I don't know anything about that.
You might think that he's failing at life, but it's interesting that you might think that... He has a service where you can sign-up to learn from him and even ask him questions 1-on-1 - for a fee, of course. Jerry Banfield's whole brand is convincing others that he has all the answers and also, he's obsessed with asking AI for advice as if it's a god.
[As with most songs on youtube, just ignore the video.]
I was driving and this came on. I was immediately captured by the story and, to some extent, the nice 80s groove.
I won't go into the details, but even in the age of AI, finding a song you heard on the radio is still a test of will power.
Aside from belonging to the "Song with a Story" category, I find I love songs like this one that have a driving, constant, almost monotonous, perhaps droning rhythm.
If that kind of thing interests you, here are two other examples.
Miracle Legion - All For The Best
Radiohead - Cuttooth
If this is an existing genre, let me know the name.
Bone Thugs-n-Harmony released "Tha Crossroads" in 1996 and it's been stuck in my head on-and-off pretty much since that time. But in those thirty years, I never bothered to look up the lyrics... not even once... not until now.
So I thought we'd formalize it - comparing my version of various snippets with the actual lyrics to see how close I was.
It should be noted that I found different sites have different lyrics. I'm just going to go with SongFacts. I'm also going to be changing around some of the formatting to make things easier to follow.
First off, the song starts with them singing "Bone, bone, bone..." as in the name of the group. That's the first surprise - I never knew that's what they were saying. Then later...
Me: Now tell me what you gonna do (when there ain't no where to run)
when judgement comes for you
when judgement comes for you?
Now tell me what you gonna do (when there ain't no where to hide)
when judgement comes for you, 'cause it's gonna come for you.
Actual: Now tell me whatcha gonna do (When there ain't no where to run)
When judgment comes for you,
when judgment comes for you
And whatcha gonna do? (When there ain't no where to hide)
When judgment comes for you ('cause it's gonna come for you)
This is a pretty easy one. It's pretty clear and obvious.
A little later...
Me: Fool, what can I do?
It's all about offending, and how we rule.
Can I get a witness, lighting the fool,
We living our lives we turn in our soul.
Actual:
Ooh, what could I do?
It's all about a family and how we roll
Can I get a witness? Let it unfold
We livin' our lives to eternal our souls...
Well, that last line doesn't make grammatical sense but whatever.
Me: Now follow me roll Stu. Weather is still savvy. So think of the people that's on their Ritz...
Actual: Now follow me, roll stroll Whether it's Hell or it's Heaven Come, let's go take a visit to the people that's long gone...
Man, this is hard.
Me: Instead of people with their family, exactly how many days we got lasting, why you laughing? We're passing- passing away.
Actual: And still keepin' up with they family Exactly how many days we got lastin'? While you laughin', we're passin', passin' away.
Not optimal but ok.
Me: He was long gone, all he did was come home but when he gotta die, gotta go bye-bye all the little thug could do was cry cry.
Actual: Now Eazy's long gone Really wish he would come home But when it's time to die, gotta go, bye-bye All a lil' thug could do was cry, cry
Fair.
Me: Why they killed my dog and man I miss my Uncle Charles, ya'll. He shouldn't be gone. In front of his home. What they did to boo was wrong. Mooo wrong.
Actual: Why'd they kill my dawg? Damn, man, I miss my Uncle Charles, y'all And he shouldn't be gone In front of his home, what they did to Boo was wrong Oh, so wrong...
The subtle difference between "dog" and "dawg" makes a lot of sense now. They didn't kill the guy's pet. For years I thought his pet dog was killed.
But on the other hand, you're never going to convince me that "Oh, so wrong" is said anywhere. The lyric is very clearly "moo wrong" - the song clearly has a bovine element that they've been trying to cover up for years. Listening again, it sounds like maybe "Hewww wrong."
Back to another easy one:
Me:
And I'm gonna miss everybody
And I'm gonna miss everyloddy
And I'm gonna miss everyloddy
And I'm gonna miss everyloddy
And I'm gonna miss everyloddy
And I'm gonna miss everybody
Actual:
And I'm gonna miss everybody (x6)
Nope. You lost me, Bone Thugs. I have ears, and that's not what you're singing.
Me: Livin' in a hateful world, sending me straight to Hell. That's how we roll.
Actual: Livin' in a hateful world sendin' me straight to heaven That's how we roll.
Oh, interesting. Slightly off, so close, but it's ok, I think I can nail the next one. Let's see...
Me: On libbin, on sibbin, on gebben nintendo, on wibbenese. When we come again, again and again. Now tell me what you gonna do?
Actual: You know while we sinnin' He intendin' on endin' it when it ends He comin' again and again and again Now tell me, what you're gonna do?
Man, I really thought I had that one. I'll take the "L," it's just surprising.
Me: Can somebody, anybody, tell me why we die, we die. I don't want to die. Moo wrong, moo wrong, moo wrong.
Actual: Hey, can somebody, anybody tell me why we die, we die? I don't wanna die (oh, wrong) Oh, so wrong Oh, wrong
We covered "moo wrong" already, I don't want to beat a dead cow.
So that's it. I can make no guarantees that the next time the song comes to me I'll be singing the right lyrics but a few mysteries were solved. I want to make it clear that the phrase "Moo wrong" is said multiple times and RIP Uncle Charles, ya'll.
Another "back to form" video, this time a Wheel episode.
I had a query about the hair video. I recognized the idea, I remember things like that being developed at the time. I may even have seen that exact thing, who knows. But I don't understand how there are no labels for each hairstyle. Like, if you watch the video and decide the fifth hairstyle is the one you want, how do you then communicate that to a barber? I don't understand.
Oh and the "I'm with ya too" line was a constant in my childhood. I still think about it today.
I've watched a lot of classic movies in my time. I think the #1 thing that disqualifies me from cinephile circles is that I hold no special regard for "The Godfather." But perhaps #2 on the list is that I have no special appreciation of Stanley Kubrick.
But one movie I don't dissent on is "Dr. Strangelove." I do like "Strangelove" and I do think it is a classic. And it's so rare that a comedy ages so well. 1964 here.
When I was a kid, they showed "Dr. Strangelove" on PBS and I remember being shocked and somewhat traumatized by Slim Pickens sitting on the nuke as it drops from the bomber. The whole idea of comedy/satire was beyond me, I just found it scary.
Other upcoming re-releases: "Point Break" and "Terminator 2" in August; "The Passion of the Christ," "Transformers: The Movie," "Princess Mononoke" in September.
Also, one of the new episodes of MST3K (from the latest kickstarter) will be in theaters September 9th and 13th (and check your local listings for exact dates).
In 1988, CBS aired a Brady Bunch reunion called "A Very Brady Christmas" and it was a big hit. I remember, not so much seeing it, exactly, but learning about it as a myth. "Did you know they made a Brady Bunch movie where they're all adults?" was passed from kid to kid as we watched TMNT or played Nintendo, which was the style of the time.
From that success, TV executives realized they could make Brady specials every few years to allow audiences to check in on the Bradys and see how things are going, and also to keep milking the cash. From that idea, someone said, "Why not a regular series?" "Fine," they said. And at some point - I don't know who or why or how - someone said, "Let's make it a drama."
Yes, the Brady Bunch show of the 90's was a serious drama, for some reason.
It's pretty nuts but this Brady Bunch show went up against "Family Matters" and "Full House" in its time slot. It also failed badly and was axed after only 5 episodes.
Here's the rundown (spoilers to follow for this crappy show):
Bobby Brady became a racecar driver in the Christmas special. In this series he crashes and is paralyzed in the first episode. Throughout the rest of the series he will hope to, and work to, get out of his wheelchair. It's fun, silly, Brady Bunch action.
Also, Bobby meets and marries a woman played by former MTV VJ Martha Quinn, which is notable.
Jan is married and is having sex. Her and her husband are trying to conceive (and having trouble) and the show makes it abundantly clear that Jan is having ALL OF THE sex. So much sex. I will never look at Jan the same way again.
Cindy is a radio DJ and dates her boss.
In the Christmas special, it is revealed that Peter is engaged but in the first episode of this series, he calls it off. Peter is a ladies' man and the joke is he basically dates a new girl every night. The only person having more sex than Peter is Jan.
Greg doesn't have much to do. He's a doctor and married to a beautiful wife (the new Gidget) and is just... kinda... he's just winning at life. That's pretty much his story.
Marsha is an odd situation. Marsha is the only case where the original actor didn't want to be in the show and had to be replaced. Which is too bad because... everyone loves Marsha and I am everyone. The Marsha character is married to a whiny loser for some reason. Her husband's main skill in life is to get fired from as many jobs as possible, leaving his family homeless. It's annoying.
Marsha slips into alcoholism. Why? It seems the show's explanation for her alcoholism is that she's bored one day and just starts drinking. And then she admits she has a problem, says she's going to get professional help and she never does. By the end of the show she is cured of alcoholism merely by deciding not to drink anymore. It's a serious topic, handled with skill and nuance.
Alice is basically comic relief and is just hangin' out. She's still married to Sam the butcher.
Mike Brady gets so fed up with his local government that he runs for office and wins. The Bradys help him with his campaign. Carol is there too.
One other note about "comic relief." The show is a terrible attempt at a serious drama, like I said, but the ratings were so bad that a few episodes in they start adding a fake laugh track to try to tap into the old Brady magic but it just makes things worse. A bad drama with a laugh track is just bonkers.
If a half hour is too long for you, you can get the core idea from the woman at 23:24.
All people generally know about a place is what the media tells them. For years I've encountered the negative side of this as I've had English people on the internet telling me how Americans are all rednecks and it's a country of uncontrolled, non-stop crime. And so finding there's a flipside to that coin - the idea that movies have imbued the country with a feeling of magic - is pretty cathartic.
It seems to me that "The Insider" is an underrated classic.
There's an interesting phenomenon here They say the movie makes them question the government and the News stories they're told, etc. - that's all well and good - but they believe the movie implicitly. Why is one form of storytelling more trustworthy than the other?
America's 250th Anniversary isn't the biggest and most important anniversary this year.
Today (June 26) is the 40th Anniversary of Hell Track. For the background on that, see here.
I'm just assuming here that the year of Hell Track is the year that "Rad" came out. Given that the movie came out in March 1986, and if we assume the events of the movie didn't occur after the movie was released, that would place the first Hell Track Day in 1985, making this post 1 year late and thus, quite lame.
We still don't have a proper tradition for celebrating Hell Track Day.
I've been going through the "World Cup Fans experience America" content and, for whatever reason, the #1 one thing people seem to be focusing on is Buc-ee's.
I have no opinion on the matter - I have never been to Buc-ee's in my life, though I have had one of their snacks: the Famous Beaver Nuggets.
In this video, Babish rates a variety of Buc-ee's offerings, and though the video is 47 minutes long and the title says "eating everything at...", he gets to less than 1 percent of the total number of foods available. Buc-ee's seems to be a wonderland of odd/unique food creations.
As a reluctant fan of the "Reacts To" genre, and a low-level movie buff, I went down the rabbit hole of movie reactions and observed one incontrovertible fact: Women Love "Rocky".
Not all of these women have made it through the entire series but, for those that have, 5 is generally recognized as the weakest. However, it must be noted that 5 is still generally really well-liked, they just rank it below the others. And there was one woman who said 5 was better than 3. Another commonality is: almost everyone hates Paulie (which is expected). But I continue to be surprised by how underrated the character of Mickey is among women (though with some stark exceptions).
They often comment how much they love the training montages and the gimmick that every big fight has a certain unique strategy.
I kept hearing about how "viral" the World Cup fans reaction videos were but, not being on social media, I didn't see any. Here's a compilation I found.
I don't know if this is the best one or what the best ones are, but I found it interesting.
If you're in the opposite situation and you're being flooded with these and I'm just hopping on a trend, my apologies.
"Philly" Comedian Joe Matarese, who lives in New York, is thinking of moving to Philadelphia (or some place in the Philadelphia area). He has created a new podcast where he talks about moving to Philly and asks callers which town/area he should move to specifically.
Blink Mike and Craig listen to his podcast and try to digest what is going on.
Another instance where I find the art of cooking (baking) to be fascinating. Particularly, Levels 5 and 6, where simple, ingenious changes actually improve the seemingly already perfect chocolate chip cookie.
It's never occurred to me to watch a Conan compilation before but here is 2 hours of things going wrong on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. No real reason, just a fun video if you're looking for entertainment.
There are lots of these types of compilations and I may have to explore more of them.
And now here's where I get pedantic...
It seems to me that the animal expert segments where the animals do unpredictable things can't really be counted as bloopers. There was no script for the animals so they can't make mistakes. However, if we're allowing "blooper" to mean anything unplanned/unexpected happening, it seems to me the animal expert segment where Conan gets peed on is a must:
In an interview with Howard Stern, Conan talks about the rough experience of his early Late Night days and identifies the specific moment when he was at his lowest:
"The one that comes to mind is... we were just on the air for 2 or 3 months and things weren't going well and then I did Charlie Rose's show when he went, 'Well, you're probably aware of what came out in the Washington Post today... The top TV critic in the world just wrote this piece and here's what it says- and it goes...' It was a brutal take down of me, Andy, everything..."
This is a story Conan had told before, though the way it was told and the location in which it was told obscured its gravity. In 2003, Conan recounted the Charlie Rose episode to Charlie Rose:
Rose: I remember at one point you, early, were on my show--
Conan: Yes.
Rose: And it was during the difficult time.
Conan: It was the beginning of the difficult time, I think, you- you informed me of one of my worst reviews when I was first here. It was about 2 months into the show--
Rose: I read it to you?
Conan: And you said I don't know if you're aware of this and you started reading and it had just come out that morning...
Now, through the magic of Youtube, we can watch the original 'offensive' interview from 1993:
Here is what Charlie Rose actually said:
"If in fact you're doing the show you want to do and critics - I just saw a piece by Tom Shales, I think, saying, 'Look...', you know, it's not working for him as a critic - does it bother you or do you say to those critics, 'I'm doing the show I want to do. If you don't like the show I want to do, then sorry. I can't please everybody but this is what I want to do, I found my voice, it's the show I want, it's the combination I want, we are approaching what I want to be."
Quite a difference. Quite a difference. It isn't Rose reading the hit piece to a horrified Conan on national TV. It's briefly mentioning the review and using a phrase - "it's not working for him" - is arguably the kindest and most sanitized summary of the article possible.
It's amazing how wrong Conan's memory of it is. But this isn't uncommon - memory is not as reliable as people think. It's quite a problem of History. If you were writing the story of Conan, who would you take as more reliable to talk about his own experience than Conan himself? And if a person recounting the major events of their own life are unreliable, how do we trust the things passed down through indirect accounts?
That aside, I accept Conan's answer to the "lowest point' question, outside of Charlie Rose. Conan got a bad Tom Shales review during a critical point in the show, it was devastating to him and that was his lowest moment doing Late Night. And I suppose, some time after that, Charlie Rose's part grew from announcing the review to reading it.
One point that I can pretty much confirm from Conan's story is where he stresses the importance of critics back then. It does seem silly now, but they did have a great deal of power in shaping public perception, for whatever reason.
Here is that Shales review, by the way, if you'd like to revisit it. And it's worth noting that 3 years later, Shales did another review that reassessed the show and was much kinder to Conan. Shales noted that the late night landscape had shifted drastically and essentially called Conan "The New Dave".
10 years after the original review, Tom appeared on Conan to promote his new book. Conan confronts Shales about the bad review (though within the bounds of the playful interview shtick).
Another aside about memory and history. In this interview, we have both Conan and Shales agreeing that the phrase "white Irish shark coming at you" was used in the review when it doesn't appear at all. 10 years after an event that directly affected them, they agree on a hallucination.
A final aside. I always found it creepy how Shales sounded so similar to Roger Ebert. It was disconcerting. How is it that the top film critic in the world and the top television critic in the world are both fat men with glasses and similar voices? I don't know but I also never heard anyone mention it.
To Conan's great credit, he seems to have handled the whole thing with great grace and, of course, seems to have a great sense of humor about it all. Shales passed away in 2024.
Robert Smigel (head writer for Conan, writer for SNL, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog) has a podcast.
In this episode, he talks to Jim Downey (Conan, SNL) and David Letterman (himself).
To the casual observer, this doesn't mean much but for someone like me, it feels like the Super Bowl.
The premise of the show (or the premise of the show within the show) - that someone in Turkey wants help writing an email to Steve O'Donnel (Letterman, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Norm Macdonald) - is ludicrous, bordering on annoying. But, again, it really doesn't matter what the premise is, with this panel.
My biggest problem with cooking as an artform is laziness combined with lack of motivation.
My second biggest problem is that chefs present to you the best way to do things as if they are Moses coming down from the mountain top and my first reaction is "Why? How do you know?" Not in a teenage-with-attitude way, but in the way that I know I can lookup the best way to scramble eggs and find 5 different chefs with 5 completely different approaches telling me that their way is the best way, all while an infinite number of other combinations exist that have never been tried.
For that reason, this video hits hard. Even if I disagree with his conclusions, this type of methodical, empirical approach to finding the best fried chicken recipe is exactly the thing to get me really invested in a cooking video.
"Why Are You Laughing" the history of comedy podcast, talks about the HBO animated series "The Life and Times of Tim."
And since you, and I, have never seen or heard of the show, it becomes a case of "Eh? You want to check it out, right?"
And I do want to check it out because he uses the magical phrase "the most underrated show of all time." Any show with that descriptor is a show I want to see. Of course, I think the most underrated show of all time is the Canadian show "The Newsroom" - which nobody has seen and when you suggest it people think you're talking about a different show and dismiss your opinion, and even if they don't, and in the 1-in-a-million chance that try to check out the show, they won't find it anywhere; but even if they did find it and watched it, they'd shrug and say "meh, it was just 'ok'" and not see where I was coming from at all, maybe you just had to be there, man - but that's neither here nor there.
Or maybe my pick for most underrated show of all time is "Hogan's Heroes."
A while back I tested the sophistication of AI by asking it to complete the request of the Electronic Bard from The Cyberiad. To understand what I'm talking about, you can read revisit that here.
The prompt is as follows:
"Have it compose a poem - a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!!"
AI has made major leaps in the past 3 years, so what does it say now?
Chat GPT:
By the way, I'm using pictures as a way of escaping the problem that my blog is probably used as input to build the AIs.
So for Chat GPT: all words beginning with S - Check; 6 lines - Check; no rhyming, no narrative, very strange repetition of the word "saga" for some reason. Terrible.
How does Gemini do?
Much better! All words begin with S, it rhymes, 6 lines, it almost conveys meaning. In fact, I would say it's blinking in and out of a sort of correct answer.
And Deep AI:
Not all words begin with S, 6 lines, with rhymes, mostly nonsensical.
And since it looks like a third part is called for, let's define what my conception of success is. The baseline correct answer that I woud expect is just to return the already written poem from The Cyberiad. AI should be able to recognize that the answer already exists and that's all I'm looking for, for now. But, in case AI never registers that answer, the goal over and beyond that would be to actually write an original poem that satisfies all the conditions.
At some point while watching the newish Hulk Hogan documentary on Netflix, a thought occurred. I was watching two well-muscled figures locked in gymnasial sport and I realized that, as much as I complain that we are in the worst era for movies - dramas are terrible, comedies are dead, the Oscars are a joke - we may be in the Golden Age of The Documentary.
"Hulk Hogan," "The Last Dance," "Downey Wrote That," "From Darkness to Light," "Yacht Rock" - are just some of the most recent excellent documentaries released. Granted, these are not the most important topics in the world, but here I'm using "Golden Age" only in terms of 1) the quality of the production and 2) the entertainment value of the result.
The Documentary genre even has a Youtube minor league system: "The Enduring Mystery of Jack the Ripper", "Codex 9/11" and "Unmasking Satoshi Nakamoto," being a few, again recent, examples. In fact, on Youtube, there are thousands of great videos where the lines between Documentary and "interesting video" blur and breakdown to the point where it becomes hard to distinguish the two.
I almost want to say that making a great Documentary has become a science, that movie studios have unlocked a formula. But "formula" is too dismissive, these movies aren't formulaic. Looking at the extreme amount of work that goes into precisely editing, I think the term "craftsmanship" is accurate. I wonder if the explanation is the rise of Reality TV. Perhaps training artists to craft drama out of existing footage for a generation has yielded a unique era for Documentary film-making.
"Hulk Hogan: Real American" is a 4-part Netflix documentary, obviously about Hulk Hogan. It is expertly made and highly recommended IF you have ever been a wrestling fan. And while I generally believe that "Hulk Hogan" would still be interesting for someone who was never into wrestling, just as I believe "The Last Dance" would be interesting to someone who was never into the Chicago Bulls - because ultimately it's about humanity and humans are interesting - I don't know and can't guarantee anything. All I can say is that I found the documentary to be expertly crafted, eye-opening, fairly emotional and highly entertaining.
Reaching the unofficial conclusion of my unofficial run of viewing the films of Robert Duvall, we come to "The Pale Blue Eye." This is the last film Duvall made and his part is a very small one, lasting only a few minutes in screen time.
This is a general trend I've found in the last movies that Duvall made: he truly reached the point where he became "old" - he looks worn down, speaks more softly and is no longer playing major parts.
With that aside, "The Pale Blue Eye" is a murder mystery centered around a military academy in the early 1800s. In fact, there are a series of murders - a possible serial killer - and Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is brought in to solve the case.
This is not just a well-written mystery movie with twists and turns, the star of the movie is the cinematography. This movie looks great. It isn't quite true to say "every frame could be a painting" but it nears that level. Excellent film, I don't know how popular it is but worth checking out if you haven't seen it.
For no particular reason, other than that this popped up on my feed and it's smooth, here's Michael McDonald playing "I Keep Forgettin' (Every Time You're Near)" on Soul Train.
My impression of Soul Train is that the "performances" were lip-syncs, which would make this post mostly pointless. I think this is the record track, but I'm not totally sure. I got nothin'.
I'm at the grocery store and they have the store music playing on the loudspeaker - it's not a local radio station, it's clearly just in the store - and "Born Under Punches" by Talking Heads comes on. I recognize it immediately and I'm somewhat befuddled - is "Born Under Punches" grocery store music?
I'm not complaining - I love the song, I love the album, it was a big influence for Radiohead making "Kid A" - but it just seems like the opposite of the kind of music you'd play at a grocery store.
Decide for yourself above.
Don't you miss it, don't you miss it! Some of you people just about missed it.
If you haven't seen "Awakenings," go watch it before watching this.
This is one of my favorite films, I think it's Robin Williams' best performance and Robert De Niro's best performance. Fun fact: the nurse love interest is Julie Kavner, who you usually know as Marge Simpson.
If you're curious as to who the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto (the inventor of Bitcoin) is, the New York Times has an article claiming to have identified him here.
Blind Mike has started hate watching GD Fenderson's second stand-up comedy special and it's worth noting that there is a playlist for all the clips of him watching GD Fenderson's first comedy special.
Dubbed "The World's Worst Comedy Special: The GD Fenderson Saga," it can be seen here.
Note that the order of the playlist is unfortunately REVERSE chronological order.
It's a tale as old as time. In the mid-70's, a man with access to a Moog synthesizer made an album for plants and didn't actually sell it, but rather gave it away with the purchase of plants. But then 40 years later it was rediscovered and released for sale. The above video tells that story, the story of Plantasia.
This episode has 29 million views and the podcast is now on Netflix but for the purposes of this blog, I'll assume you haven't seen it because that's the only way this works.
The Kill Tony Podcast is a type of "America's Got Talent" or "American Idol" for stand-up comedy. A bunch of (very) amateur comedians get pulled from a hat, perform for one minute and then get critiqued by a panel of professionals. Although, unlike those shows, it's more of an exhibition than a competition.
In this episode, the panel includes then-nominees Donald Trump (Shane Gillis) and Joe Biden (Adam Ray). It's excellent.
A youtuber, David Hartley, tells the tale of how The Beatles' "A Day in the Life" came to be.
You can see more footage of the night of the orchestral recording in the official music video:
Mick Jagger was there but that's not as interesting as the fact that Mike Nesmith was too (2:34, 3:33). The Monkees were a huge influence on The Beatles.
One thing I've heard that isn't covered is that at the end of the song, while the piano is vibrating, you can hear the air conditioning of the Abbey Road Studios kick in. But that may be a myth, I don't know.
This PSA aired in my area so often, it's not ingrained in my mind and gets stuck in my head often. This, despite the fact that I don't know 90% of the lyrics and never have.
For whatever it's worth, I think this youtube version is sped up and the proper playback speed is 0.90.
Somewhere around 2000-2003 (college) I resolved to watch every episode of "Mystery Science Theater 3000." It was the heyday of file-sharing, in those days, and such a thing was just, at that precise moment, theoretically possible. Big, special shout-out to eDonkey and eMule. "Possible" but not necessarily easy.
To illustrate the effort of watching every MST3K episode, I used to say that it was harder than watching every episode of "The Simpsons" (or basically pick any long running series you want). The reasoning is simple: there were (at that time) about 200 episodes of MST3K and each one was about 1.5 hours long, so that's about 300 hours of viewage. Compared to "The Simpsons", I'll even include all the episodes made since then, the math is: 805 episodes, at 0.3 hours each episode that's about 250 hours of viewage. Note: it's a pretty good metric for comparison because download effort and file availability are generally proportional to the length of material. This metric, of course, doesn't take into account how bad "The Simpsons" has become, though.
Given the disorganized nature of file-sharing, I created a spreadsheet to act as the source of truth, each episode listed, each had a "watched" or "not watched" status. I even added percentage calculation and a countdown to 0 because I had a lot of time on my hands and it seemed cool. But on that spreadsheet there were always 4 blank spots: 4 "lost" episodes that did not exist publicly in any form.
After 1 or 2 years (perhaps more, it was a long time ago), I finished the goal - I had watched every available episode and, by that time, I simply made peace with the idea that there were 4 episodes that just did not exist.
Then, in 2008 the "Pilot Episode" ("The Green Slime") (not really an episode) was shown at a convention and bootlegged on Youtube. Check. Down to 3.
Then, in 2016 two more "lost" episodes ("Invaders From The Deep" and "Revenge of the Mysterions from Mars") were found by the MST3K Producers in their archives and were released to backers of the 11th Season Kickstarter. Check and check.
That left ONE unreleased, "lost" episode.... One episode that no fan has turned up. One episode that even the creators of MST3K confirmed they had no access to.... What are the chances that someone somewhere taped it, kept the tape, held on to it for 38 years and never told anyone?
A few days ago, arthurputie on Reddit posted that his cousin had bought a load of old VHS's at a garage sale in the Minneapolis area and that one of them was labeled with the episode name ("Star Force: Fugitive Alien II"). Arthurputie confirmed it to actually be the lost episode and it has now been uploaded it to Youtube.
Lost no more.
This is not posted as a recommendation. If you are not a MST3K fan, avoid the early episodes at all costs. If you are a MST3K fan, still avoid this at all costs. This is only posted for Completionists like me with a 25 year old score to settle. That, and it's also a fascinating archeological discovery.
So here's the final word. I have now watched all the episodes of MST3K, it is still difficult and the spreadsheet has not been updated to 0 because it was lost in a hard drive crash 10 years ago. Oh, and new episodes are in the works.
Continuing my exploration of Robert Duvall movies and I cannot be definitive here - I haven't watched them all, nor will I - but I may have hit upon the worst movie Robert Duvall ever made.
With such a legendary actor in such a lousy movie, what scapegoat can I blame for this outrage?
Written By: Robert Duvall
Directed By: Robert Duvall
Starring: Robert Duvall.
DANG IT.
"Wild Horses" stars Robert Duvall, James Franco and Josh Hartnett (remember Josh Hartnett?). Three fine actors, and yet none of these people plays the protagonist of the movie. The protagonist of this movie is, apparently, played by one of the worst actors in the history of film. I say "one of the worst" but cannot say that she is "the worst" for I have seen Rod in "Birdemic" ....but she's clearly one of the worst. The main plot is a crime investigation of sorts - Luciana Pedraza is an Argentinian playing a Native American cop with no emotion and a Texan accent; she is paired with a cop partner (not worth looking up) who is coincidentally played by another insanely awful actor. Whenever there are scenes of these two people interacting, it's incredible, it's like staring into infinity mirror of emotionlessness.
How did this happen? How does the best American actor of his generation not weed out terrible actors when casting his own movie? Well, I can only explain the terrible lead - the terrible lead is played by his real-life wife, a woman 41 years younger than himself.
Bad acting from main characters is huge in this movie but isn't the entire problem. There's also bad acting from the minor characters - and in pivotal scenes. Very pivotal and very emotional and very terrible scenes. But also, the cinematography of this movie varies between on-par-with-Walker-Texas-Ranger and dreadful. There are moments with bad sound. These moments could have easily been fixed in ADR but weren't, somehow, for some reason. The editing is weird and awkward. The pacing is weird. The movie is lifeless and not believable - it's simply boring. At many points, this movie doesn't even feel like a movie.
If you've ever wondered what would happen if you dropped a great actor into a terrible movie, here's your experiment. I would like to say that Robert Duvall transcends his surroundings but I can't say that. This movie is so empty and unconvincing it even makes Robert Duvall's acting seem questionable.
I looked on youtube for a scene or compilation of the bad acting in "Wild Horses" to share for demonstration, but I see nothing. That seems strange. Maybe, as bad movies go, this flew below the popular radar.
One of the things I love discovering and posting about is pop-culture surprises and oddities. A while back I looked at the history of Peanuts TV Specials and noted the oddity of the live-action "It's the Girl in the Red Truck, Charlie Brown." There is another Peanuts oddity that I have been avoiding posting anything about but I may as well just get it over quickly and move on.
I'm just going to say it. The plot of "Why, Charlie Brown, Why?" is: a little girl in Charlie Brown's class gets cancer. And.... that's not what you expect when you want to watch Snoopy.
I can't do a beat-by-beat breakdown of how wacky and crazy it is - it's well executed, I suppose. The noteworthy thing is just the very concept is shocking and unusual. So it exists, I watched it, it doesn't make sense to me but perhaps that's due to the nature of Peanuts - it's watched by kids but wasn't intended to be solely for kids; it's not afraid to get serious among the jokes, and so forth.
Evidently it was well received and was praised for helping educate kids on this subject.
Robert Duvall's passing has given me impetus to revisit his filmography. Some movies are re-watches of his classics, some I'm watching for the first time. Among the "new" movies, it's a mixed bag, of course. But I have found one so far that I would consider a "hidden gem" - "A Family Thing."
Duvall stars as an older man whose mother dies and reveals in a letter that she was never actually his mother. His mother was a black woman and, oldey Southerney times being what they were, he was taken away to be raised by his white father and was never told of his heritage.
The corollary of finding his mother was black is that he has black kin who he's never met, including a black brother (James Earl Jones). Duvall sets out to meet his brother and events evolve from there.
This movie is very much a product of the 90s (both good and bad but mostly good) and it's just a very nice, fairly mundane character-study-slash-buddy-movie. It has the feel of a play. The premise (or the casting, really) is ridiculous Robert Duvall doesn't look mixed race in any respect, but if you get past that hurdle, it's excellent. I considered it like "Back to the Future" - you just have to accept that a DeLorean was made into a time machine and then you move on. The true highlight of the movie is simply seeing two great actors - Robert Duvall and James Earl Jones - acting together.
A few more notes: the script was written by Billy Bob Thornton - this is after he'd made the "Sling Blade" short but before "Sling Blade." Secondly, James Earle Jones was a lifelong stutterer though I never saw it in any form and I doubt you did either, but in this movie he uses it as part of his character. Finally, I just to have to get out that the title is terrible. It's so uninteresting and unmemorable - it may be the sole reason this movie is so obscure.
So there you go, I'm not saying this is a classic, it is not perfect, but it's a solid, charming movie from another era with two legendary leads and I really enjoyed it.
I was quite sure that I posted this in 2020 and I was quite sure that the video was taken down and that the link on my blog needed to be corrected, once a substitute was found. So here is the substitute, even though I now see no evidence that I ever posted it in the first place. Having memories of false posts is an annoying problem.
This is The Hu, a Mongolian metal band who are no longer new but put your mind back to 2020 and they were pretty new. The mixture of Mongolian throat singing with metal rhythms, plus the utilization of the Morin Khuur (horsehead fiddle) within a rock context is, if nothing else, extremely unique, you have to admit. What a tremendous and unexpected East-meets-West mash-up.
Of the songs of theirs that I've heard this is the only one that really hit me hard. It rocks.
Now let's all agree this post is real and definitely exists now.
No, "Fonzie Fights Tom Hanks" is not the latest AI slop, it's the slop from the 80's known as "Happy Days."
In this episode, "A Little Case of Revenge," Fonzie's nemesis from 3rd Grade has been harboring a grudge since then and shows up wanting to fight him using the art of "karate." The karate nemesis is, of course, played by Tom Hanks.
The scene is played for laughs so, unfortunately, it's not as wild and whacky as it sounds.
This role helped launch Tom Hanks' career. Ron Howard used to be the star of "Happy Days" but had moved on to directing. He saw the episode and that led to him casting Hanks in "Splash." This is also the first time anyone hits Fonzie.
