I gotta tell ya, I really enjoyed the I Love The 70’s show on VH1, and then they did the …80’s which was ‘meh’, and now they have just jumped into doing I Love ‘the past week’ which is either a brilliant or very sad move, or both.
My question is, these things are scripted, right?
I mean, I can’t remember half that stuff from the 70’s, but these artists and comedians doing the snide little commentaries seem to remember every detail of the subject matter. (and I can’t stand that Ian Black fellow; he is quite annoying–tries too hard to be sarcastically funny)
They either see the segment or are told about the segment beforehand. I can’t believe someone can remember so much detail about Pet Rocks. I had one and I don’t remember anything about it other than it was a rock in a box.
(The killer is when they have someone on who was probably 2 yrs old when the event occured and they talk about it like they remember it fully.)
Also, why do they talk about that stuff like it was ridiculously stupid at the time? Obviously we were into it…ok, except for disco…and it’s OK to make fun of it in hindsight, but they act like they were making fun of it WHILE it was happening.
That just seems dishonest.
Does anyone remember making fun of it at the time, i.e. recognizing the ridiculousness of whatever as a fad and that it wouldn’t be around long? (Again, disco is exempt from that question)
They actually aired/taped the first “I Love the 80’s” before the 70’s one.
I’m pretty sure that they probably give the people a list of topics they plan to cover and let them prepare. I mean, what’s the harm in that? They never really claim that these people are doing it off the tops of their heads, so they might as well give them time to work up some funny material. As you know from watching the shows, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t
The whole wine-drinking, laid back California lifestyle was skewered by Cyra McFadden in The Serial.
There were any number of parodies of “I’m OK, You’re OK” and other self-help books.
Johnny Carson once famously told actress Karen Black, who was going on about overpopulation, “Then stop f*cking!”
Doonesbury started in the 70s as Gary Trudeau telling stories of Yale, with the requisite set of student radicals, guilty white liberals, and dumb jocks.
The National Lampoon and the National Lampoon Radio Hour and Second City led to Saturday Night Live, and none of them were exactly kind to contemporary culture.
I think one of the few good things about the 70s was the era of making fun of contemporary culture.
They’re doing exactly what they did with Behind the Music– beating us to death with a program that proved marginally popular on its first couple of airings. (After the 47th airing, I don’t know, it seems to lose something.)
Ian Black rubs me the wrong way, too, but that fucking Queer As Folk guy needs to be dropped off a cliff.
Though I’m sure he’d still be offering his smarmy pop culture summaries even as he plummeted to his death. (“Oh. Yeah. Now the idea, of course, is that I’m going to -adopts finger quotes- gain speed with my descent, until I ultimately become one with the earth at over a hundred miles an hour. Yeah. And I suppose then I’m gonna be (oh yeah this should be great) just strewn across the landscape in a bloody stew of cartilage and bone. Yeah. I’m sure that’ll work.”
It works for me, Queer As Folk guy. It works. For. Me.
Apt Screen name. Apt plan for Hal Sparks too. I’m a big fan of Queer as Folk; but Hal annoys the ever-lovin’ hell outta me. He was marginally okay on Talk Soup, though inferior to Skunk Boy or Aisha Tyler. But his stilted acting in QaF is horrible. And his commentary on the I Love … shows is inane.
Well I’m a big fan of “The Best Week Ever”. I almost started a thread about it after the first episode, but I figured it was too silly to merit a topic (although there have definitely been threads about the decades shows). I love it because most of the time it’s just what I’m thinking, only funnier.
For example, last week I saw a store selling those horrible Ugg style boots that look like they’re made of sheepskin, and I thought, “That must be the new fashion, but I can’t imagine why.” Then a day or two later, I saw a woman on the train, dressed in a cute skirt, wearing those terrible boots, and again I thought, “Hmmm…” So when I watched last week’s episode of Best Week Ever, and they did a story on the stupidity and ugliness of those boots, declaring that they are now “out”, I laughed and laughed.
To answer the OP – the decades shows are clearly heavily edited. My WAG is that the process goes something like this:
Show nostalgia item to commentator, hoping for recognition or a funny initial reaction. If you get something good, keep it in the show.
If the commentator doesn’t really remember the item, explain the item, perhaps adding a few salient facts that can be used to work up a good joke. Obviously, all of this explanatory material will be cut out of the final show, leaving only whatever good stuff the person said.
If the commentator still doesn’t say anything funny or memorable, move on to the next commentator or the next item.
As for the Best Week Ever shows, they’re put together over the course of the week, so the comments are constantly being refined (all right, you probably can’t call any of the comments on that show refined). They have a blog where they discuss the current week’s events for potential inclusion in the show.
Tell me about it. I Love The 80’s featured actress Raven-Symone as a commentator, and she was 3 or 4 when 1990 hit. I’m less than a year younger than she, and I honestly can remember very, very little about the 80s. It makes me cringe when she (and other under-18ers) talk about something that happened before they were born with nostalgia and “Ohhh, I remember that!!!” :rolleyes:
I Love The 70s features rapidly fading one and a half hit wonder Jason Mraz, who according IMDB was born in 1978. Like his slacker/stoner comments weren’t useless enough to begin with, then it turns out he was too young to really be a part of the show anyway. Then again, maybe I just hate him because of that stupid baseball hat sitting perched on his head at the same mathemathically calculated perfectly “stylish” crooked angle everytime I’ve seen him wear it.
As unfunny as Michael Ian Black’s ironic comments are, using the same smug deadpan delivery every single time just gets old quick.
I tried watching The Best Week Ever, but I remembered the Frank Zappa quote about the ever shortening cycle of nostalgia and not being able to take a step without becoming nostalgic for the previous one and had to stop. Plus I’ve hit my saturation point with Mo Rocca, the man even turns up on CMT now!
At least Leann Rimes has the excuse (maybe) of being too young to remember or properly understand much of the 80s.
Lisa Marie Presley’s comments during I Love the 70s were just as pointless, dumb, and ignorant about that decade and she was born in 1968. Many (if not most) of the celebs were clearly picked for name recognition and popularity rather than wit, insight, or recollection.
But I’m still trying to figure out how they picked some of the unfunny comedians and humorists invited to be a part of these shows. Godfrey? Brian Unger? Debra Wilson? Jim Gaffigan? Bil Dwyer? Tom Arnold? Pauly Shore? And the ever annoying and completely unnecessary Joel Stein?
to be fair, I remember a great deal of stuff that is ‘before I was born’. any toy or fad on the show is from the year it was started/released. so I may have been 2 when rubix cubes came out, I cerainly had several and remember them from my childhood. and many shows that started when I was born were still on by the time I cared about tv, if only in reruns.
I’m gonna have to aggree with owlofcreamcheese, I wasnt born in the seventies but I "Remembered " almost all of the thingsfrom that show, as well as most of the things from the early eighties. I mean I was either very youung or not born at all when Tron came out, but I saw the movie several times in my life and remember it well.
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I find those shows quite funny, I mean, I thought the Micheal Ian Black and Hal Sparks, as well as the rest of them, were entertaining, and I hope that "I love the 90’s is not far behind ( I hear there might be one soon anyway).
NO! NO! SHUTUP! Nothing I can remember distinctly is old enough to be included on an “I love…” show. NOTHING! I went to High School in the 90s and I’m still in college, so it can’t be that old!
