Batman?! It was fucking *Monster Movie Week *on the channel 7 4 o’clock movie! Talk about a traumatic childhood memory.
My neighborhood got cable pretty early in the 70s and we did get HBO. Right after we got it Jaws was going to be on. The first time it was on HBO. I somehow managed to convince my parents to let me watch it. I was very exited for a week. Of course the cable went down right in the middle of the USS Indianapolis scene and didn’t come back on for hours.
Now that you two have me wondering if I thread like a boy, I had to look it up:
“don’t hold the thread still and fetch the needle up to it; hold the needle still and poke the thread at it; that’s the way a woman most always does.”
Whew! I won’t get mistaken for a boy.
Watching Doctor Who on PBS back in the 80s. They broadcast the Tom Baker episodes, and then the Peter Davidson ones. Peter Davidson’s Doctor regenerates in a cliffhanger episode.
I tune in the next week to see who the new Doctor is, and… there isn’t one. Instead PBS is rerunning Tom Baker. I don’t think they reran the entire set of Tom Baker episodes, but they covered a fair chunk. Then they reran Peter Davidson. At the end of these Peter Davidson’s Doctor dies and regenerates in a cliffhanger episode. This whole process takes another year and a half or so.
But finally, I get to see the next Doctor! I tune in the next week and… there isn’t one. PBS broadcasts “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” in the timeslot instead. This was the first time for me to see HG2G, and the humor blew me away, so my frustrations were somewhat allayed.
I’m hoping that after HG2G they’ll get back to showing the next Doctor, but no, after that it was either more Tom Baker or something else. I can’t remember because my interests moved on and I stopped watching. To this day I’ve never seen a single Colin Baker or Sylvester McCoy episode.
Some would say that you didn’t miss much. Colin Baker wasn’t received well by many fans, and his two companions Peri and Mel are among the least regarded. McCoy’s era was marked by the writers trying to create an aura of mystery about the Doctor’s true nature that at times approached mysticism. The franchise was limping at that point.
This should probably go in a Your Most Infuriating Radio Memory thread but I don’t think that idea would have much traction.
In 2007, I was driving home when the local station broke in with their breaking news dramatic gong and fanfare. I expected an assassination attempt, plane went down, something big.
“Breaking news just in…Anna Nicole Smith is dead.”
Followed by about 5 minutes of vapid reporter spew on someone who most people probably never heard of. I know I hadn’t.
I mean no disrespect nor disregard for her death, but when I found out exactly who and what she was, the utter idiocy of the alert was forever seared in my mind. Next to 9/11, it’s the most eventful news story I can recall, EVER, and that still insults and infuriates me to no end.
Yeah, I’ve since read several complaints about both of these Doctors, which is one of the reasons that I’ve never really bothered to try and get ahold of their episodes.
Still, at the time it was very frustrating to see Peter Davidson die twice, and never get to see Who (ha ha ha) he became next.
I was eagerly anticipating the Adam West Batman series when I was a kid. Halfway through the first episode I thought, this is stupid. They’re making fun of Batman, and *me * for liking him.
To each their own. Long time Doctor Who fan (and the PBS drives that made shows late, long and interrupted get to me) and I like what they tried to do with both the sixth and seventh Doctors. I do agree that the writers were trying different things and the producer kept holding them back. Who knows if it would have worked.
Back on topic and the fund raising. I really didn’t like the PBS fund drives. I understand now why they were needed but it still felt rude. “Okay, we will release your show only if we get twelve new callers in the next three minutes.” That’s more like hostage negotiating!
And, ouch, Harg, on the breaking news of ANS dying. Yep. Seems like we have lowered our standards of what is breaking news.
Well, I guess the real question is: which way works better?
Does anyone remember Boomtown? It was an NBC crime drama shown from different viewpoints. Good writing, interesting characters and some really great acting - Neal McDonough was a god-damned treasure. So, of course NBC had to “Firefly”* it. They didn’t show all the episodes, moved it around on the schedule, put it on hiatus and ended it early. Then, to add insult to injury, they renewed it for a second season after a “retooling” by dumping characters, making the story linear and turning it into Law and Order Lite.
And another OJ anecdote. We were watching the low-speed chase on TV (why eludes me at this moment), and we heard a disturbance outside. We turned off the TV, and looked outside. There were about 3-4 cop cars outside, fighting with our next-door neighbor, who was resisting arrest. They finally subdued him, and put him in the car and drove off. We remarked about the excitement, and turned the TV back on.
It had been off so long that the picture had to warm up again, so we got audio before we could see anything. As the picture started to come in, we heard the newscaster say, “…the way we thought it would end…with the death of OJ Simpson.”
I was infuriated by Boomtown itself. It seemed to me at the time that they gave up the Rashomon format after the first episode. Not that the show was bad - just that they didn’t deliver what they promised. Just another (but still enjoyable) cop show.
Poking the thread at the unmoving needle works better, in my experience.
Klinger showing up on MAS*H.
You realize he was a recurring character beginning in the very first season, right? I think he first appeared in the third or fourth episode.
Ah, Labor Day. A day off right before school started, and when I was a young adult, I finally had access to a TV and could watch my soaps. One of the few days I had off on weekday and could laze around watching my soaps.
What I would forget every year? Jerry Lewis telethon. :mad:
Now, I rarely get a weekday off but when I do, I like to tune in to **Giada at Home **and **Barefoot Contessa **from 3:00-5:00. What are the chances that of all the shows, that one day I get off, it will be repeats from that other handful of days I got off this year? Sadly, pretty good.
4th, actually. “Chief Surgeon Who?”
I always move the thread into the needle but folks in my quilt guild swear that moving the needle to the thread is the way to go.
[QUOTE=DonLogan]
Klinger showing up on MAS*H.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah. I had read the book; when Klinger showed up in the TV show, I thought it was cheap and unnecessary.
I watched The Prisoner during its first run, and was loving it. I dutifully watched each episode as it played out, and was greatly anticipating the series finale.
Finally - all my questions will be answered.
But, I was in high school band at the time, and since school was starting up, the band was going to be performing on finale night at some kind of introduction/orientation thing for students and parents.
Since home video recording was still far in the future, I set up my trusty reel-to-reel tape recorder (long tape since it had to run an hour or so before the show even started), placed the microphone, and planned on at least capturing the audio experience of the show.
Got home, recording went fine, and the next day I sat down to listen to the recording and enjoy all the reveals that were sure to take place.
Well, if you are familiar with the series at all, you know that the last couple of episodes are quite bizarre and create far more questions than they answer - if you can understand the answers at all.
At the end of the recording, I had no clue as to what happened or how the whole story came about. To say I was frustrated and perplexed would have been putting it mildly.
I had to wait until the following summer when they re-ran the series again. This time I was finally able to watch the series straight through and view the final episode.
I was almost as confused having seen the final show as I was when I had only heard it. While I found the show brilliant and mesmerizing, the finale didn’t offer the closure I had been hoping for. Only years later when PBS ran the series and had explanations and commentary did I finally see the bigger picture and accepted the unexplained mysteries for the open interpretative concepts for what they were.