Category: Television

I got this videocassette last August, so it was atop the second cabinet in the family room, and I’m kinda trying to reduce the overflow so that it only overtops the videogame cabinet and not all of the cabinets that make up our entertainment center and unwatched video library. I’m getting closer to that goal, but I’m always one book sale or garage sale away from buying twenty more videocassettes or DVDs.

At any rate, this is a 1994 collection of skits from his television program which ran from 1955 to 1989. It runs a little under an hour and a half, so to get a bunch in, it jump-cuts between bits. I might have caught a glimpse of it back in the early 1980s–did it run on cable somewhere? I remember my father liked it, as (I am told) did my father-in-law. I mean, it’s a human cartoon, a bit bawdy in places but not exclusively sexual humor, and this collection features only a couple of scantily clad ladies. Hill does a song or two, recites an off-color poem, but most of the bits are topical–a television talk show host having trouble with his guests, a man’s life in under a minute, some workplace humor, and one about the accent of a Chinese visitor to England who encounters–an Indian, I guess–in the customs line (that would definitely not fly today in the West). A lot of the bits use the sped-up or I guess “undercranking” technique to make the action seem cartoonish and jerky. So, I guess if you know who Benny Hill was, you know what you’re getting. But not boobs; this is not Showtime’s take on the short-lived Canadian equivalent Bizarre.

Ya know, some people credit Monty Python’s Flying Circus with bringing down British civilization, but maybe because the Monty Python crew, with their films offering greater exposure to American audiences, via their humor mocking institutions. But here’s Benny Hill, doing it for decades longer than Monty Python’s Flying Circus was on television, and…. No credit. Or maybe it’s because right around the end of the 1960s, the sketch comedy shows stopped focusing on mocking the powerful and instead started mocking one political side over the other. I am sure that dissertations were written along the lines of this argument, but I can’t be arsed to develop the thread more than that. And how would I know? The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour only lasted two seasons and was off the air before I was born, but somehow it made its way into reruns and syndications that I could see them on television.

At any rate, this videocassette was amusing–moreso than Zombieland which was also an action-“comedy”–and, you know what? If I should come across a larger boxed set, which Ebay has shown me exists, I’ll pick them up. But not for $100 on Ebay.

UPDATE: I am remiss in mentioning that after I queued up this post, VodkaPundit mentioned Benny Hill on Thursday:

Doctor Who, Fawlty Towers, and even Benny Hill’s show soon followed. “Yakety Sax” and ample British décolletage took on improbably outsized roles during my tween years.

Don’t get me wrong. Even back then, I knew that Benny Hill was by far the least sophisticated of the British humor I’d fallen in love with. In fact, “sophisticated” and Benny Hill might never have appeared in the same sentence before this one and the one immediately preceding it. But if there was ever a middle-aged man who knew how to target humor at 12-year-old boys, his skills were nothing short of genius.

He, of course, did not mention reviewing the source material recently.

Maybe I should slow down on watching the DVDs of old black-and-white Dragnet shows I bought this summer. After all, having watched one in October and another earlier this month, I’m going to run out of novel things to say about each disc.

This one includes a couple of commercials–instead of Chesterfield cigarettes, we get a couple of L&M cigarette spots as well as a Post Cereals spot. So those are certainly novel. And I noticed and thought worthy of mentioning that not every show starts out with the “This is the city….” montage, but maybe half of them do–with Friday narrating over it some trivia and “I’m a cop.”

This disc contains:

• “Big Break” where Friday and the gang surround the house of a wanted man, and a shootout ensues.
• “Big Hands” where Friday and Smith investigate the murder of a woman in a hotel room.
• “Big Betty” where con artists are preying upon the families of the recently deceased.
• “Big War” where Friday and Smith try to avert a bloody gang war between rival groups of juveniles who might go at it with pipes, brass knuckles, and knives–and their leader is a 17-year-old high school student whose mother coddles him.

Again, enough variety to keep you wondering what might come on next week episode. Most, again, adapted from radio plays.

Maybe I should start watching to see how often, or even if Jack Webb says, “Just the facts, ma’am,” which was kinda the catchphrase associated with him in my youth. Maybe not.

And watching this program, coupled with the fact that my nineteen-year-old has a professional job where he dresses in one of my suits for a variety of events, makes me think I should haunt thrift stores looking for sport jackets. I’ve fallen away from going Grant over the last couple of years. Maybe I should get back to it.

I bought four of these DVDs in Nixa this summer and watched the first last month. They comprise 4 30-minute episodes per, so I could feasibly watch one whole DVD a night, but I break them up more than that–the first I watched over four non-contiguous nights, and this one I watched on two consecutive nights.

Not that that matters, but maybe it will when it comes to binge watching them–if they’re too formulaic, I’ll get bored with them. But they’re not formulaic. Friday and his partner are working different details in different episodes, so they’re working on different crimes. Although many of them are still based on radio plays, the structure of the episodes differ as well–some take place in the interrogation room, some have different sets and different structures to them. I dunno how different any of the Law & Order subseries are episode to episode–perhaps I’ll be pleasantly surprised in two or three decades when I stumble over a DVD copy of early episodes and plop them into the only working DVD in southwest Missouri in my nursing home senior living facility.

At any rate, the back of this DVD has the titles for the episodes, although they do not appear before the episodes themselves.

• “The Big Phone Call” deals with the interrogation of a jewel salesman who might have helped stage the robbery of a rival.
• “The Big Cast” deals with a fugitive who shoots Friday’s partner and Friday’s efforts to find him.
• “The Big False Make” shows the story of a local gardener who confesses to a robbery, but his story doesn’t add up.
• “Big Frank” features Lee Marvin as a suspect in a murder whose story breaks down.

So I enjoyed them, but I am old enough to have watched black-and-white television programs on black-and-white television shows. In the days before Facebook slop was black-and-whiting stills from television shows in the 20th century which were broadcast in color. So I’m of a certain age. And, to be honest, I’m glad of it.

Oh, and one difference between this disc and the first: This disc includes the pitches for Chesterfield cigarettes that played with the program. Not the announcer coming into the station house promoting them, but rather Jack Webb pitching them ahead of the program. What a strange world we live in: Modern commercials are full of a couple of vices (drinking hard liquor and gambling) but not smoking any more.

Lileks has been running through the later, color version of the program for a while now, which probably inspired me to buy a couple of the older television program’s DVDs in August. And I popped the first of them in recently–I say “the first” because it’s the first I watched–they do not appear to be numbered at all.

This DVD has four episodes. In one, a shoplifter is hitting shops on Wilshire Boulevard: A middle-class kleptomaniac! In two, a hit and run driver kills a grandmother and hurts a boy. Is it the delivery driver with a taste for liquor or a counterman at an evening diner? In three, a baby is abandoned at a bus station, but the woman who found the baby, the wife of a man who has been stationed overseas for over nine months might not be telling the truth. In four, a couple of little girls are kidnapped by a, you know, and were not killed because he’d lost his pocketknife.

So, about the technical bits about the storytelling. Many were adapted from radio dramas, and it would show if you knew what that meant or might mean. That is: the shows have a bunch of narration over stockish shots or filmation with no talking and a couple of scenes with characters talking shot in tight rooms with lots of closeups. Kind of like what you’d see or expect from a movie based on a stage play.

Second, these programs were on television in the beginning of the 1950s, and the themes echoed on to the 1980s when I was growing up and beyond. So if you’re reading literatureem> and thinking about how things were not terribly different from 1770 to 1850 or whatnot, you can do the same with the themes from this program and the 70 years since, I reckon.

Two ackshullys, one wrong, and one right:

1. Right: The back cover mentions It spawned a movie version in 1987 with Dan Ackroyd. Ackshually, that was spawned from the 1967-ish revival, as Harry Morgan plays the same character in each.
2. Wrong: On Tuesday, Lileks mentioned a “What’s My Line” with William Schuman, the President of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and composer, and Lileks said he’d never heard of him. Ah! But I prepared a “Of course you have” post about the theme of Dragnet. Ah! But that was Walter Schumann, I realized after I hit Publish, but fortunately RSS is not a thing and I was not caught up. Forgive me, Internet. Also, note that I confuse bathos with pathos, too, especially when keeping up with Lileks lately and thinking therefore but the grace of God and maybe a little while go I.

I guess I have three more DVDs in the line (50s Dragnet) to watch along with the remainder of the complete first season of The Twilight Zone (and a couple of other random episode discs) to make my way through. But someday, maybe soon, maybe not. Why rush things and eliminate all the suspense from my life which is not the real suspense of my life, which is every day if I want it?

Ah, gentle reader. It took me a while to finish this series; I started watching it with my children in 2019, but we wandered away from it (as we did so many things, and still are). This year (or maybe last–it’s been a while) I started over with it, and this time I made it through. It’s 27 episodes, more than a full season, and as I mentioned when I watched part of Season 1 of The Streets of San Francisco, I’m daunted by watching complete seasons or complete series because of how long in calendar time they take–even things which are but a single season, such as this one was.

So: This program aired on the fledgling Fox network in 1993 and 1994 when it didn’t have programming five nights a week. Bruce Campbell plays the title character, a Harvard-trained attorney turned bounty hunter who is hired by San Francisco business interests to find the man who killed his father who was escorting a criminal gang run by John Bly to trial/prison/whatever. A mysterious object, The Orb, is discovered in a mine nearby, and it’s the McGuffin that will drive many of the connected stories, although not all of episodes further the story arc–the early 1990s were just about where things turned that corner from episodic to serial, and it blends them both (as did The X-Files which also debuted that year).

So each week, Brisco hunts a villain of the week or such. Early on, he competes with a black bounty hunter who styles himself Lord Bowler to capture Bly, but eventually they become friends and partners. It has a cast of recurring characters, including John Astin: as a wacky inventor; Kelly Rutherford as a show girl who was John Bly’s girl but comes to appreciate Brisco more; a renegade who works for Bly and serves as a comic foil as he constantly goes into digressions about art, literature, and philosophy; a proto-Elvis Presley who becomes a sheriff in one of the towns Brisco visits; and later a pretty boy card player. It’s more steampunk than straight-ahead Western (and it has its tongue planted in its cheek the whole time) as it has anachronistic things like rockets, tanks, motorcycles, and other call-aheads to things or people not invented yet. It also has a set of that guy as guest stars starting with M.C. Gainey (whose name I will again forget once I post this) capping with Terry Bradshaw in the two-part season finale (Terry Bradshaw, it seems, has not aged much in 30 years since this was on television).

It’s a bit hit-or-miss, and I put it aside for a couple of weeks before ploughing through the last eight episodes (I thought I had another four to go, but the last disc is special features which I skipped). All right, but it might not be something I watch again.

Although if I were, it would be for Kelly Rutherford.

Continue reading “On The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. (1993-1994)” →

I got this DVD in June, so it was atop the video cabinet where I have most of my unwatched videos, and I popped it in because I feel that I’m making pretty good progress in at least clearing that media from the top of the video cabinet. Not so much the box atop the video game cartridge cabinet. And I’m hitting a Friends of the Christian County Library book sale this Saturday on bag day, so I’m likely to reload it soon. Also, I just bought a The Complete Series on DVD (at full price on Amazon) which is only a single season, fortunately. But I digress.

So this is a 20th century artifact, and a particularly 1990s one at that. Seinfeld’s humor is very urban, Manhattanish in nature and kinda upper class–he talks about being in airplanes all the time–one of the first bits is about airport security in 1998, and, brother, I am from the future, and you don’t know how good you’ve got it.

A couple bits I laughed at, but I guess I’m more of a Blue Collar Comedy Tour kind of guy.

The video wraps the “live” performance with a skit about Seinfeld holding a funeral for his old “bits,” the comedic riffs which he used both in standup and on his television show. Notable comedians of the time such as Garry Shandling, George Carlin, Robert Klein, Paul Reiser, and Jay Leno and other media people like Ed McMahon and Larry King. Brother, I am from the future, and you don’t know how good you’ve got it.

I’ve read The Seinfeld Universe, and I’ve watched seasons 1 and 2 of Seinfeld. And even with that education, eh, not a big fan. He’s not especially crass, but the observational humor is outside what I normally observe. Probably I should get out of the basement more anyway. But.

It’s not like I’m going to have to dodge videos of his standup specials. It looks like they’re pretty few and far between in his filmography, and the last was on Netflix, so it’s not like I’m going to have the chance to stuff that into my bag on Saturday.

A couple of years ago, I saw a meme with Rod Serling and recognized which Twilight Zone episode it came from:

That’s from “Five Characters In Search Of An Exit” which I saw on The Twilight Zone Volume 21.

I saw this meme at Wirecutter’s:

I thought it might be from “The Grave” which I saw on The Twilight Zone Volume 6 in 2023.

But research indicates that it’s actually from “The Shelter”.

Which is odd: As I mentioned when I read The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia in 2018, “The Shelter” is one of the episodes I remember from my youth. But I haven’t seen it in 40 or so years, so I guess I can be forgiven for not remembering the opening narration visuals.

As I have been pawing through the video cabinet, I have discovered I have another of the “Volume #” single DVDs and probably have not finished season one that I have as a set. I should probably do so since I find The Twilight Zone to be very inspirational as far as speculative fiction goes. Watching it (or reading about it) triggers some creativity in me and gives me ideas.

Also, just so you know, gentle reader, the number of times I’ve spelled twilight correctly the first time in writing this post (look at how often it appears above) is two. All other times I’ve typed twighlight first. Make of that what you might.

For some reason, the 1970s show The $1.98 Beauty Show came to mind recently. It was a briefly running variety program that looked like a beauty pageant but really was not.

Apparently, as with Sha Na Na, you can find full episodes digitized from videocassette recorder early adopters’ home collections:

Well, maybe it’s not that much different from what you see today as entertainment, but adjusted for the changing times.

And for the life of me, I cannot remember why this program came to mind. Sometimes, I think I’ve just got my brain on Shuffle.

Tom Selleck’s future plans after ‘Blue Bloods’ revealed — and it involves ‘Yellowstone’ creator:

From cop to cowboy?

Tom Selleck is getting candid on the future of his career after the axing of “Blue Bloods,” saying he’d love to star in a Western helmed by “Yellowstone” creator Taylor Sheridan.

The 79-year-old revealed he isn’t ready for retirement in an interview with Parade published on Friday, dishing on his dream role.

“A good Western’s always on my list,” the legendary actor shared. “I miss that; I want to sit on a horse again.”

Sheridan recently worked with Sam Elliott on the “Yellowstone” spin-off “1883,” and Selleck explained that’s a trio he’d like to join.

“Sam was great in [1883], Sam’s always great. We go way, way back. I love him dearly. I’d love to work with Sam,” he told the outlet.

Selleck has been in many westerns. Including two also starring Sam Elliott: The Sacketts and The Shadow Riders. So way back with Sam Elliott goes forty-five years as does Selleck’s experience with Westerns. Which is further back than Blue Bloods and even Magnum P.I. (the original, when the Cylons did not look like humans).

I picked up this DVD in a cardboard sleeve sometime in the distant past. I cannot tell you whether I paid a full dollar for it in a grocery store around the turn of the century when they carried little public domain collections on turnable racks or if I bought it at a garage sale, but it doesn’t have a sticker on it which might indicate it was wrapped in cellaphane when I got it. The sleeve was open, though. So, who knows? (And, probably, who cares? Although, gentle reader, these details are interesting to me, such as Did I have this in the video stacks for twenty years or only three?)

This disc contains three first-season episodes of the television series which ran from 1951-1953.

• “Frankenstein” retells, briefly, the tale of the movie version of Frankenstein. In his castle on an island on a lake, Dr. Frankenstein creates life. The monster, played by Lon Chaney, Jr., gets called ugly by a little boy who’s staying in the castle and becomes murderous. Bullets and a fall into the lake cannot stop him, but apparently electricity can. It’s a long book, but the story is more based on the movies more than the book.
• “The Cosmic Egg” tells the story of an antiques dealer who asks a professor to examine a crystal egg for which someone offered a high price; the professor eventually determines that it is an alien device for monitoring people on earth. Based on a story by H.G. Wells.
• “Appointment on Mars” tells the story of the three men who are first to Mars and hope to stake claims to minerals there. However, they start to get paranoid and turn on each other. The story stars a very young Leslie Nielsen, seemingly before his voice changed, and was written by Salvatore A. Lombino–Evan Hunter/Ed McBain.

The picture and sound quality are what you would expect from a seventy-five-year-old television show that was probably only incidentally taped and lapsed into public domain. Of course, it didn’t bother me because I have watched many such cheap transfers, both for television programs and for actual movies, some of which even had sound. So it’s no telling what kids today would make of them. Probably not enjoy them. But back in the old days, when television was starting to replace the radio, I bet the kids ate these up.

I bought this, the first half of the first season of the television program The Streets of San Francisco, recently, but apparently as part of a purchase that I did not enumerate for you, gentle reader. Perhaps it was the beginning of August, when I went to the antique malls to finish my Christmas shopping before I spent a couple days of my vacation ferrying my brother to and from his homestead to a medical appointment in St. Louis. I wanted to have the Christmas shopping done so I could take the Christmas presents over since I could not ship them because I lack certain stickers for the package. I bought a couple things for myself during this excursion, but apparently not enough to have posted about it.

Not that it matters where I got it, but I dived right into it. I remember that my sainted mother watched this show, whether on first run when I was really young or in syndication when I was what would later be called a “tween.” (Where did that word go? I haven’t seen it lately. Maybe I don’t see it because my boys are past that now.) But I didn’t remember much about it, and what I might have–San Francisco and Karl Malden–is undoubtedly mixed with Rice-a-Roni (the San Francisco treat) and American Express (Karl Malden saying, “Don’t leave home without them.”) commercials.

This set of 4 DVDs contains the first half of the first season, which is the television movie pilot (based on a book called Poor, Poor Ophelia which I might just look for now). This is actually a pretty good snack size for my television watching, as larger sets that we have which include complete series daunt me–they will consume my evenings for a couple of months–but this one was only a couple of weeks. I might pick other such volumes up if I see them, as I enjoyed the series.

If you’re not familiar with the series, it has an older police detective, Mike Stone (Malden) partnering with a new detective (Michael Douglas) who is educated/a college boy (not clear: how he came to be a detective; a few years in uniform would have acclimated him to police work and made him less of a college boy than he is in the show, but never mind–maybe that’s covered in the book). They work all kinds of cases, not just homicide–although they get their share of those. It was filmed on location. Well, from the second season on, the entire show was filmed in San Francisco, so you really do get a sense of place. I’ve been to old San Francisco twice in the early part of this century, and even then it was dingier than in this program comes out of the 1960s and shows a little bit of the seemy side. But not as gritty as modern shows, I imagine.

I won’t go episode-by-episode (Wikipedia has a list with short plot summaries). I will say that the story structure varied widely; it was not a formulaic body-detect-solve or body-we know who the bad guy is-detect-solve structures. In some of them, the actual crimes do not occur until the second or third act (each portion of the show is enumerated as Act I through Act IV with an Epilog outro). In others, the crime occurs within the first minute. We have some kidnappings, some assaults, and some homicides. In most cases, Malden wants to talk or negotiate with the criminal. There’s a little fisticuffs and a little gunplay, but most of the time the bad guy is taken into custody.

So it was a pleasure to watch, not only for the sudden nostalgia I’m having for the 1970s. Anemoia, I know, nostalgia for a place you’ve never been because I was very young then and did not have to deal with an adult’s cares, but I remember it as a secure time for young child Brian J. and I remember the look and feel of the time. The film made me want to get a couple of sport coats and return to going Grant which I have fallen out of again because I’m really not going anywhere, really, these days, and when I do, dressing business casual makes one stand out in not a good way.

I could not help but note how the intro kind of matches the style of that for Hawaii Five-O. Both have that sixties/seventies sound to them and feature a lot of quick clips of tourist locations with a lot of zoom effects. Compare:

The later program started earlier and lasted longer, and I watched it in syndication more completely than this program.

As my youngest took his driving test as I started watching, I could not help but chuckle that the drivers followed all of the obscure rules that trip you up on the driver’s test. They turn the wheels to the curb when parking, but that’s easier to remember when you’re parking in San Francisco on a thirty degree incline. When kidnappers nab a guy on the street, they signal to re-enter traffic from the curb. So a little extra for me. The lad passed first try, or I would have made him watch the series with me.

I couldn’t help but notice, also, the guest stars in many of the episodes went on to get series of their own. One episode has Hutch, and then a later episode has Starsky. An early episode has Mr. H., and another has Mrs. H. from Hart to Hart–and the latter episode has Devon Miles from Knight Rider. Mel from Alice is a recurring character as is Dr. Huer from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. So in addition to a bunch of that guys from 1960s and 1970s television, we get people who would go onto some success of their own. Lost, I am sure, on younger viewers. But are there younger viewers? Probably not.

And, yeah, the anemoia is hitting me hard these days, what with all the books from the 1970s I’ve been reading an my earlier excursion into Sha Na Na this summer. I suppose if it all turns out okay, my boys will have a similar sense of the 2020s that my parents probably would not share with their adult perspectives and no assurances.

Ah, gentle reader. After successfully ploughing (as one does in England) through (which does not rhyme with “plough” though–although though and although do), ahem, after successfully ploughing through the first six series of Red Dwarf, I thought I might delve even further back in my DVD set acquisitions and watch the two seasons of Sledge Hammer! which I got in 2004. So, yes, it has taken me twenty years to get around to watching these (as opposed to only thirteen years for Red Dwarf). I felt compelled to watch it as I was reliving my television watching of the 1980s and because Lileks posted a picture of David Rasche recently (and I do mean like within a month or so ago recently).

I mean, I did run through the first season some years back, back when our DVD player was a PlayStation 2, but when it switched to the second season with its lower budget and “five years earlier” thing, and I couldn’t continue–which is also how it went with Red Dwarf–it stepped out of my nostalgia zone and I couldn’t deal with it. But I plowed through both seasons this viewing, and it took as long as Red Dwarf because it was basically the same number of episodes in two seasons of American television as it was for six series of British television.

So: Sledge Hammer is a police inspector, a spoof of Dirty Harry–underlined by John Vernon playing The Mayor in the pilot episode, wanting a man who gets results to locate his daughter who has been “kidnapped” by a terrorist group. Hammer is given a new partner, Dori Doreau, a woman to act as a straight, er, woman to Hammer’s excesses which include shooting his gun, roughing up suspects, and talking to his gun. Most of the episodes spoof on movies or detective show tropes of some sort or another, and I certainly benefited from being familiar with the source material. Perhaps not in 1986 when I watched it on television, but certainly now.

So I chuckled at some of the nearly 40-year-old gags. You can basically derive my sense of humor from droll English humour like Red Dwarf and spoofs like this. Maybe that’s what built my sense of humor as these were on the telly in my teenaged years.

And if the Internet had been a thing back then, perhaps we would have had Detective Doreau versus Officer Daley arguments.

Continue reading “On Sledge Hammer! (1986)” →

Ah, gentle reader, we have been very light with the movie reports here at MfBJN, and that’s for a good reason: I have actually watched the boxed set entitled Red Dwarf: The Complete Collection which my beautiful wife gave me for my birthday in 2011. Soon, though, it was an incomplete collection, as they made two movies and four more “series” (seasons) of the program all the way up to 2020.

As I have mentioned, the PBS station in St. Louis played an episode of this television program after Doctor Who on Sunday nights. So I recorded a couple of them by programming a videocassette recorder like the ancients did. The first two “series” (seasons, as we spell it in the United States) were released in 1988, so they would have been the ones I have on the old grainy videocassettes. Given that each series is only six episodes, I must have seen quite a percentage of them in those old days. Not long after I got the set of DVDs, I started watching them with my beautiful wife, but she did not care for the common insult of the show, smeghead, so she dropped. And when I got to the start of the third series and saw its abrupt shift in the opening and the different look to it, I shelved it for a decade. But I powered through it this time.

So, the setup: The Red Dwarf is a mining ship, and Dave Lister is the lowest technician on the ship. He smuggles a cat on board and, when it is discovered, he is put into a stasis field for the remainder of the voyage (and will be docked that pay). A radiation leak kills the crew except for Lister, and the computer (known as Holly) releases him three million years later when the radiation levels have cooled. Holly can also project a hologram of a single ship’s crewman, so he chooses Rimmer, Lister’s immediate superior officer, roommate, and foil. Additionally, the pregnant cat gave birth three million years ago, and her progeny evolved to a cat civilization in the ship’s hold, of which only a single representative, called, appropriately enough, Cat, remains. Eventually, they pick up a fifth main character, a service mechanoid named Kryten.

So that’s basically the show: Four or five people dealing with zany creatures they encounter, time rifts, and so on. The first two series were just a couple of sets, but the show’s budget increased over time, and the individual series kind of have themes. The Red Dwarf is stolen for a couple, so they’re pursuing its trail. Or nanobots have rebuilt the Red Dwarf, including the crew (this is the last series in the set). The characters are kind of types: Rimmer is the Flashman type, a blustery nincompoop; Lister is a lower class slob; Cat is a dumb dandy; Holly is a bit daft; Kryten is servile. The humor tends toward the zany situations in which the characters find themselves, the characters playing to their types, and the crazy verbal metaphors they come up with to describe circumstances and situations. It’s funny in spots.

The Wikipedia entry uses the term “retcon” to describe changes between the series, but that implies a continuity that the show itself does not expect or enforce. Kryten, for example, is a one-off character in series 2–the first episode, actually, and he does not appear again in Series II but is a regular character in Series III. In Series III, the original Holly is replaced by a Holly from an alternate universe they encountered in Series II, but the substitution is not explained. Some of the series end in cliffhangers which are sometimes explained quickly at the beginning of the next series–or not. The series that features them hunting for the Red Dwarf starts without showing the precipitating events. Sometimes it tries to explain things–like how they swap out Rimmer for Christine Kochanski in Series VI. So they’re comfortable with having some recurring characters/situations/themes, but they’re not tightly bound to what has gone before (and I understand that later series kind of throw out the last couple of series in this set).

So amusing overall and funny in spots, and I planned to be discouraged about the crew going on for a decade without changing or finding earth, but the different concepts and shifts from series to series kept it fresh.

However, I found binge-watching–and I watched two or three episodes most nights for several weeks–to be kind of difficult. It’s probably easier to enjoy a show like this in its original form–an episode a week, which keeps the repeated tropes from being too obvious.

I am not in a hurry right now to run out and buy the rest of the series. But if I found them at a library book sale for a buck each or in an antique mall for a couple of dollars, I would be tempted. And you all know I cannot resist that temptation, so perhaps the word I’m looking for is fut accompli. That is, a fait accompli in the future.

Lileks today posts a tweet:

And says where he knows “this guy” from:

An actor who was in Succession, but I remembered him from an ep of Miami Vice. He played a CIA agent named “Surf.” It’s the one in which (spoiler) he turns out to be a Russian agent, and has Castillo trapped. Of course Castillo pulls out a sword and assumes a pose that’s supposed to make us think “Oh of course Castillo is a Samurai dude, he has skills,” and the actor says “when you go, you go all the way.” Why do I remember that?

Lileks does not name the guy, but, c’mon, man, that’s Sledge Hammer. Apparently, actor David Rasche was in other things, but I haven’t seen them.

Come to think of it, I have only watched the first season of the complete Sledge Hammer! set I bought in 2004 (anticipated here and acquisition acknowledged here). I watched the first season again with my boys when they were younger (probably already a decade ago). When I finish up the current DVD set of a television show that I acquired a long time ago, perhaps I should dig it out. In addition to boxes of movies and documentaries of dubious quality, I have many box sets of complete (or almost complete) or random single seasons of television series to watch. Someday. Maybe.

But David Rasche. Say his name. Although if you’re like me and have only seen it in print (in my case, the Sledge Hammer! credits), you might mispronounce it.