Random Cable TV Observations

So I was watching Comic Book Men the other day and during the commercial AMC is advertising its Thanksgiving Week lineup. First on Turkey Day itself Gone With the Wind. OK so far. Then on Fri., The Godfather Saga. Even better. The next day--a Hitchcock marathon. There were clips of Vertigo and Rear Window. Fantastic, maybe AMC will be returning to its original mission and live up to its initials (American Movie Classics) instead of just showing zombies and mad men. But then we got to the final day of the Thanksgiving weekend and how do they cap off this cinemaphile's feast? A Steve Segal marathon!!?? NOOOOO!!!!

Robert Osborne and Mark Cousins introducing
The Story of Film on TCM
Credit: David S. Holloway, TCM 

Speaking of classic movies, I've been faithfully DVRing TCM's showing of the British documentary series The Story of Film: An Odyssey on Monday nights. I've been DVRing because lately they show it at 2 in the morning. When the series first started, the doc would air at 10PM and movies referenced in that week's episode would be screening around it. Maybe the ratings for the Story have fallen off and the programmers are placing it in a slot it can't do too much damage. I'm really enjoying learning about all these obscure Russian, African, and Asian films and listening to narrator-historian Mark Cousins' lilting Irish accent. But he really needs to dress a bit better during the intros with Robert Osborne.

In the mornings, I tend to channel surf while slurping my instant oatmeal. The Hallmark Channel is currently going through its endless rotation of Christmas movies, so they're not showing Golden Girls reruns. That leaves me at a loss. The political news is too depressing to watch Morning Joe (thanks a lot, Obama). So this morning I found Jeff and Cole Casserole, a really weird, low-budget comedy show on Logo, featuring two kooky gay guys talking about Jessica Lange and Joyce DeWitt. My kind of show.

King of the Nerds Finale and Reality TV Update

Genevieve should have won King of the Nerds

King of the Nerds ended with the wrong winner! Sorry, but Genevieve deserved to win over Celeste. She went to the Nerd-Off three times and beat experts in their fields--She beat Virgil at dancing, Alana at comic book trivia, and Moog at engineering. She led her team to victory. I didn't get the reasoning behind the votes for Celeste. She grew as a person? Oh give me a break! The good news is King of the Nerds will be back for a second season. And Danielle, who came in third, is a sore loser.

My stupid DVR did not record Project Runway. It only seems to do that with the high-defintion version of Lifetime TV shows. So I had to record the nonhigh-Def version of last week's episode with Joan Rivers in the 60-minute format and this week's high-school duct tape challenge. Haven't had a chance to look at it yet.

Over on Comic Book Men, the gang held an auction of a loyal customer's massive comic-book collection so he could pay off his medical bills. It's good to know if I ever need extra medical coverage, Superman and Batman can pay for it. At the auction, Walter was dressed as Martian Manhunter, but I had no idea who Mike was supposed to be.

The Day After Sandy; Comic Book Men

It's the day after Sandy and even though we still have power, it feels as if we're cut off from the rest of the world. We've been very lucky here in Jackson Heights, Queens. No blackouts or damages, but much of Manhattan has been devastated. Last night we were flipping through cable and local channels, watching transformers explode, streets flood, and hospitals evacuate. Tweet after tweet announced electricity going out, stretching from lower Manhattan into Chelsea. It was like following the course of the outage as it moved uptown.The subways are flooded and probably will not be back in service for at least a week. Everything seems to be shut down, while I have gotten FB posts and hundreds of Tweets, I've gotten no emails for hours.

Lately I've developed an addiction to courtroom shows but they are all pre-empted due to disaster coverage. I suppose I enjoy Judge Judy and Judge Joe Brown, etc. for the same reason I like Hoarders  I can watch it and say "At least I'm not as bad as that. My house isn't that cluttered and I would never loan money to such a creep." When I was little and if I stayed home sick I would watch game shows (Sale of the Century, Snap Judgement, etc.) in the morning and cartoons like Speed Racer in the afternoon. It's interesting that the only game shows still around on broadcast TV are classics like Let's Make a Deal and The Price Is Right. Of course at 3:30 we all watched Dark Shadows. When I wasn't sick, my sister and I would run home from school, turn off all the lights, draw all the shades, and try to scare ourselves to death with the supernatural melodramatics goings-on with Barnabas Collins and Dr. Julia Hoffman.

Which leads to this week's Comic Book Men on AMC. The central plot was a Halloween prank with the guys investigating ghosts in the basement and scaring each other as we used to do with Barnabas and Dr. Hoffman. The important part occurred when a customer brought in his Thundercat figures to sell (The customer was a pretty hot guy, BTW.) This led to a discussion of everyone's favorite childhood cartoon series. Kevin opted for the conventional Superfriends, but Walt offered the unusual choice of Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space. He said the space villains intrigued him. That's pretty lame. I'm a little bit older, but I do confess I did watch Josie and her troupe both before and after she got lost in space and picked up that annoying Bleep thingie.

My favorite would probably be Frankenstein Jr. and The Impossibles. Superheroes were really my thing and so were supervillains. This shows was stocked with them. Batman was on at the time and there was a colorful baddie every week. This cartoon consisted of one Frankenstein Jr. segment and two for the Impossibles. I didn't understand why Frankenstein got the top billing if he had only one cartoon and his co-stars had two. Anyway, the Impossibles were a trio with superpowers disguised as a pop band. Every week they faced two different wonderfully bizarre characters--these included the Bubbler, Mother Gruesome, the Twister, the Paper Doll Man, and my favorite, Televistron who could shoot you with a ray gun and you'd be teleported into a TV show. Frankenstein Jr. was a robot version of the classic monster built by a boy genius Buzz Conroy to fight evil. It was fun and silly and well-drawn as compared to the Thundercats crap of the 1980s. Today's cartoons seem to be returning to the high production values of yore.

Last week on Comic Book Men, Ming and Mike lost a bet and had to recreate the wedding of Reed Richards and Sue Storm of the Fantastic Four. Very funny.

The Amazing Race 21: Episode 3 and This Week in Reality TV

What does this comic book cover have to do
with The Amazing Race?
Just read the blog, fanboy!

This was a banner week in reality TV. Project Runway is nearing its conclusion (I've only watched the first 30 minutes of this episode.) Comic Book Men began again on AMC. There was a really good scene with a woman coming into the shop and discussing the Legion of Super-Heroes with the staff who were excited to debate which was the lamest legionnaire (Bouncing Boy) and the drawbacks of Cosmic Boy's pink uniform. They even brought up Bouncing Boy marrying Triplicate Girl and then one of the guys pointed out that she was Duo Damsel by the time they tied the knot because one of her multiple selves was killed in action (by Computo, the giant living computer BTW, see the illustration to the left).

I've started watching The Fabulous Beekman Boys on the Cooking Channel. I saw all of season one on Netflix on my Kindle Fire, now the Cooking Channel is running season two. They are up to the third or fourth episode where Josh has to fly to California for his advertising job and Brent meets with a chef who has been on Top Chef to sell his caramelized hot sauce. (Six degrees of separation in the reality TV world: Top Chef-Beekman Boys-Amazing Race) Meanwhile, I'm reading I'm Not Myself These Days, Josh's memoir of his days as a drag queen by night and an advertising art director by day (I found it at the Claverack Library book sale, the same place where I bought those three sci-fi collections for a few dollars.)  To top it off, the third episode of the Amazing Race in which Josh and Brent the Beekman Boys are contestants, was a real knuckle-biter.

Before I give you my impressions of this week's TAR, let me just observe that Josh and Brent have become an omnipresence (I just made up that word. Take that, Lewis Carroll!) in my warped pop-culture universe. Two TV series and a book in addition to meeting them in person. It's like I'm looking into their lives at four different times as if in a sci-fi novel. The Amazing Race must have taken place a few months ago, season two of Fabulous Beekman Boys was last year and Josh's book is probably 10 to 15 years in the past. Plus their Facebook page puts them in the present.

Team World Domination in a loving embrace. (just kidding)

This week's Amazing Race starts in Surabaya where the first four teams get the clue and have no idea where they're going. It takes eight people to figure out they need to get a cab to find a restaurant where they have to serve 20 dishes at once without dropping anything. During the interviews, Ryan of Team World Domination crushes his girlfriend with his bicep with loving mock violence. Josh points out the race has divided into super competitive alpha teams and "regular" people who are just trying to get by. The Beekman Boys appear to have a strategy of quietly and efficiently completing the challenges so they don't appear to be a threat. Last week, they had very little screen time, meaning they were not flashy or screaming at each other (unlike on their Cooking Channel show where they bicker all the time.) They have moved up from 7th to 5th place, so their under-the-radar M.O. is serving them well. This helps them this week, they are on the first train out of Surabaya after the restaurant challenge and the four other teams ahead don't feel worried about them.

In the next town, the roadblock is a choice between wearing a heavy lion dancer costume and marching in a parade or having eggs fried on a coconut on top of your head. The first four teams go for the lion costume and Josh and Brent, being farmers go for the eggs. The Chippendales let slip some Freudian innuendo when they laugh about squeezing together into a tiny rickshaw. ("It looked like we were on a honeymoon," giggles one of the Jameses.) Team World Domination wins again--I'm beginning not to like them--and they get a free trip to Fiji, the first travel prize of the race. I prefer it when the team you don't expect to win triumphs. When it's a young athletic couple taking all the prizes, it's gets kinda predictable. The Beekman Boys stay in fifth place and appear to have enjoyed the egg experience. They are having a good time, unlike the next four teams.

The real drama starts when the "stragglers" arrive on the second train. One of these four teams--Mutt and Jeff, the Sri Lankan twins, Mr. and Mrs. Monster Truck, the Barbies--will be eliminated. You'd think it would be Mutt and Jeff, the TAR fans who've applied seven times, who are always dangerously at the bottom of the pack. This time there's a double U-turn and you just know these two are going to get it. Mr. and Mrs. Monster Truck fulfill their destiny by U-Turning Mutt and Jeff who, not knowing who is ahead or behind them, uselessly U-turn the Monsters who have already made it to the finish line by this time. While the ill-fated duo are completing the second part of the roadblock by having the eggs fried on their heads, the Barbies get utterly lost thanks to a bad rickshaw driver. It turns into a close race to the finish with the Barbies      just losing to Mutt and Jeff. Boy, are those guys lucky. But their good fortune won't hold out too much longer as the number of teams shrinks.

Digital Comics, Project Runway, and Comic Book Men

I'm probably the only blogger who will write about those two topics in the title--comics and Project Runway--together in one post. I just happen to be that weird combination of gay man and geeky fanboy. I remember thinking I was also probably the only person in the tristate area who carried both the latest edition of the New Yorker and the new I Zombie in their shoulder bag. I am also probaly the only kid who had Doctor Who paperbacks next to Doestoyevsky on his shelf.

But the strange dichotomy comes under the heading of what I've been reading and watching lately. As you may recall, my partner Jerry got me a Kindle Fire for Christmas and I have been downloading a lot of crap onto it. There's an app for Comics and I have so far downloaded about ten so far. I hope it doesn't take up too much space because I don't know how to put them in the cloud--don't you love these technical terms? I still don't know what cookies are.

I also wander if I should download comics because that will diminish my need for actual print comic as opposed to virtual ones. So far I have downloaded the latest issue of the Fantastic Four, a comic version of the Avengers--the British TV series with Diana Rigg and Patrick MacNee, not the Marvel Superhero group--an indie comic called Too Much Coffee Man, the first Man Mad comic from Mike Allred, Archie's gay friend Kevin Keller's premiere solo issue--see my earlier post on Rick Santorum. The app also had an entire run of the first 20 or so issue of Batman from the late 1930s to the early 1940s. I downloaded an issue featuring the work of Dick Sprang, one of the most prominent artists of the 1950s Batman with the square jaw and the ever-present smile.

This leads me to the new AMC (American Movie Classics) series Comic Book Men. Many cable reality shows are based on collectors of esoterica who have stores where weirdoes come in to sell their stuff and the hook is how valuable this junk is. Pawn Stars, American Pickers, etc. are examples of this genre. This new series is based on the real-life store in Red Bank, NJ owned by Kevin Smith called Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash. Smith made several movies incl. Clerks (which I've never seen). Side note: Isn't it weird how cable networks have all sort of melded together. AMC was originally a purveyor of classic Hollywood fare, but now they are a weird amalagm of original programming (Mad Men and The Walking Dead) and this reality stuff, just like TLC and Discover and the History Channel. Anyway, I watched the first episode of Comic Book Men and part of the second (too tired). It's strictly for comic book geeks like me. The four nerds--and I mean that as a compliment--who work in the store greet weirdos who come in off the street trying to sell them some crap from their attics. In between negotiations, the quartet does some goofy stunt like sell overstock at a flea market or play street hockey. I'll have to watch more to form a solid opinion, but it's kinda fun and the type of place I'd hang out at.

But I've grown disillusioned with Project Runway All Stars. The co-dependence between Kara and Kenley is not enough drama to keep me going. The biggest conflict each week is when someone uses someone else's sewing machine. I think the main problem is the designers have all been through this before and there is no Tim Gunn to shepherd them. The last episode I blogged about was the Miss Piggy challenge. Nothing very exciting has happened since.