The McWetlog

A question. Since before your sun burned hot in space, and before your race was born — or at least since the early 1990s — I have had a question: Who was that guy in the Goodyear tires vs. tuneups ads? I’d also seen him in a guest role on The Golden Girls, but at no point did I ever have a name. Yeah. That guy.

Now I have a name — Thom Sharp — but not much information: IMDB, Muppet Wiki.

My latest nostalgia attack was brought on by a reference to the Cavity Creeps in a recent South Park episode. Cavity Creeps? Yes. Remember these ads for Crest toothpaste?

(That merry band of Crest-suited militia also used submarines, surface vehicles and fighters.)

Boy, was my childhood ever infused with advertising. And boy was I ever susceptible to it.

I received a copy of Cosmos on DVD from my brother for Christmas — too late for me to blog about it as part of the Carl Sagan blog-a-thon that took place on December 20, the tenth anniversary of his death, but here it is belatedly.

It’s safe to say that I grew up on Cosmos: portions of the series have persisted in my memory since it was first broadcast (when I was eight); I also had a copy of the companion book which I have since, I guess, lost. It made a big impact on my impressionable mind, but only in its discrete parts; it was only now, when I was able to watch the series, beginning to end, as an adult, that I was able to appreciate the whole.

Sagan was making an argument with this series, and each episode, and each point within each episode, illustrated with an historical analogy or with a simple demonstration, contributed to that argument. To point out that complex organic molecules are easy to make, and that the laws of science — of physics and chemistry — are the same throughout the universe, is to support the argument that life on other worlds is not only possible, but probable. A parallel argument is our connectedness to the greater universe: how, for example, supernovae essentially built us, by providing our planet’s heavy elements and the cosmic rays that enable mutation-driven evolution. And so forth. This was never a mere science program, or even a science program with a lot of neat material on the history of science.

One unexpected reaction — we must be getting old — was that despite our strong interest in the series’s subject matter, Jennifer (and I, to a lesser extent) had real trouble staying awake. PBS programming was slower paced in 1980, and Sagan’s manner of speaking and tone was surprisingly soothing.

Never mind the Rachael Ray drinking game (which really ought to have something for “yummo!”); how about a drinking game for Chef at Home’s Michael Smith? Every time he says “flavour,” take a drink — I guarantee you’ll be blotto within 10 minutes.

Thanks to a gift from my brother, we’re working through season one of Battlestar Galactica. Out here in the sticks, where we have two kinds of broadband, our cable company does not carry Space (or a number of other channels), so we haven’t been able to watch this show, which has gotten tremendous buzz around the net. But now we’re seeing it.

We’re quite excited about it; it’s tremendously well done, with lots of moral ambiguities and flawed characters that make the show very interesting, if not necessarily comfortable to watch. Lots of intelligent touches here and there: in the way the spaceships move; in the Cylons’ use of technology; in the handling of religion; in dealing with the gravity of having a twelve-world civilization reduced to fewer than 50,000 people.

This is nothing like the original, which looks embarrassingly juvenile in comparison. We’ve come a long way in two and a half decades of TV science fiction.

Almost but not quite absent from the obituaries of James Doohan (Star Trek’s “Scotty”), who died this morning aged 85, is the fact that in 1979-1980 he had a role in a live-action Saturday morning children’s TV series, Jason of Star Command (fan sites here, here and here).

Jason was one of many programs from Filmation, a studio that produced a whole shitpile of low-budget cartoons from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, including the animated Star Trek, Fat Albert, Tarzan, Flash Gordon and a bunch of cartoon versions of sitcoms. With animation and even music constantly being reused, they emphasized quantity rather than quality, and boy did they ever produce; that rotating thing in the credits (“Produced by Lou Scheimer and Norm Prescott”) was permanently etched into my retina by the time I hit the fourth grade. For more, see part one and part two of a feature on Filmation.

I remember watching Jason rather avidly — I may have even had a pre-pubescent crush on Susan O’Hanlon. It later occurred to me that “Commander Canarvin” kind of looked like the late 1970s version of James Doohan, but I couldn’t remember enough about the show to make the connection until today’s obit provided a title.

As an aside, that character actors are remembered primarily for their roles, with their catchphrases as their epitaphs, is a real pity; they’re invariably finer people than the dreck they perform in, or the lines they’re given (Slim Pickens’s Wikipedia entry is filled with quotes from his better known movies, for example, which has little to do with him, I think).

I’ve never been much for Doctor Who — low-budget British SF has always left me sort of nonplussed — but I must confess that I’ve been sucked in by the new series. I don’t think it’s just the production values; the writing’s smart, and I’m in awe of the abilities of Christopher Eccleston, who’s already given up the role. This is a profound pity: he’s extremely watchable and an absolutely fantastic actor; his predecessors look positively somnolent in comparison with his hyperkinetic style. The CBC’s Stephen Cole has a bit on the updated Doctor Who (his other columns are worth a read too).

Last night’s episode, “Dalek,” was a marvel — the Doctor Who equivalent of “I, Borg.” If you get that reference, you’ll understand immediately. (Update: James’s review of this episode: “Dalek stands among the best the original series has to offer, and it takes the series into areas it has rarely gone.”)

Don Cherry’s wardrobe explained.

I hereby nominate Rupert Boneham as patron saint of everyone who ever made the mistake of thinking that hard work on behalf of a group would make them be accepted by that group. Boy have I seen that before. (Someone photoshop him onto a “Think Different” poster, hmm?)